Ajay Bhargav B

What does it feel like to be an engineering manager at Amazon: Since the RTO announcement it became popular to write shit about Amazon, but it's still one of the best companies around the world. A few weeks ago, Gilad Naor shared with the 'Leading Developers' readers 3 lessons from his time as an engineering manager at Amazon. Here is the first one, read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/dHBxv2Ha 𝟭. 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺𝘀 My first meeting at Amazon was baffling. I entered a room with about a dozen Software Development Managers (SDMs) and Product Managers (PMs). Everyone sat in silence and looked at their laptops or the printed papers they had before them. It was my second day at Amazon, and I picked up one of the extra sheets and started reading. After those first ten awkward minutes, everyone finished reading and the meeting began. Why do Amazon meetings always start this way? This is a specific example of how Amazon approaches problem-solving. It is the "Good Intentions Don't Matter" approach. In a famous internal video, Jeff Bezos talks about why good intentions are irrelevant. When things don't work, it does not matter what people wanted. All that matters is fixing the problems with mechanisms. For example, many busy managers come to meetings without first reading the prep material. They all intended to read the 6-Pager before the meeting. They just got sidetracked by the latest emergency. Scolding the managers won't solve the problem. A mechanism will. This is why all Amazon meetings start with a study period. The remaining meeting time is then spent on high-quality decision-making. Meta solves the same problem by creating cultural norms. I can't count the number of times that I heard a senior leader cut off the presenter: "Stop, assume that everyone here already read the slides. Let's get to the point." This is a culture-first approach. I have seen this work well in some teams, and not work at all in other teams. At Amazon, the solution is part of the company's "operating system". ------------------------- Anton here - by now everyone is familiar with the 6-pager concept, but that "operating system" thinking can be used almost anywhere. Think about something annoying that your developers do, and how can you solve it. For example, I remember being annoyed that people don’t update the Jira tickets. Finally, after requesting multiple times, now we just take 20 seconds from the standup to update them.

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When I left Apple, I got a 50% pay raise, and unknowingly left millions of upside on the table… After getting laid off from my first full time job in tech, I was very excited and relieved to land at Apple, a company I had long admired. It was my first job in BigTech and I learned a lot about company culture during my time there. My salary there was a bit smaller than my prior role. But, on the perks/benefits side of things, the company was very generous. Google was just emerging from the garage phase of life, so the whole BigTech compensation arms race hadn’t really started yet. My former director from my first job recruited me to the company she had joined, which was a younger public tech company that seemed to be doing pretty well, and had survived the dotcom bust. She was looking for a tech lead for the web team, which was working on the corporate web site, the marketing lead-gen system and the customer support portal - lots of stitching internal systems together in the database layer. After going through technical interviews with the team members, she made me an offer - one I seemingly couldn’t refuse. It was 33% more salary, 50% more bonus and more stock options annually. Topping that off, she wanted to support my growth as a team lead and eventually provide an opportunity to try out management. So, I decided to go. There were many reasons for me to make the leap - fantastic manager, growth opportunity, and compensation. But, the main point of this post is that compensation can be tricky to gauge head-to-head. If I had only gone for the compensation, it would have been the wrong decision. It turns out that the Apple stock options I left behind would have been worth multi-millions by the end of the vesting schedule. After I left, the stock split and then split again after a short time and continued to go up quickly in value. Stock compensation in a public company with a solid track record is almost as sure as cash. No, it is not certain, and you have to make your vesting cliffs. But, it is vastly different from pre-IPO shares. And, if you get RSUs that are vesting quarterly or monthly, that is basically cash compensation. The good news is that I took that 50% pay raise and used it to start building wealth. I did not change my standard of living, but instead increased and diversified my stock market investments, maxed out my retirement accounts (401K and IRA) and started on an accelerated pay-down of my home mortgage. Had I finished 5 years at Apple, I likely would have been financially independent early in my career. Instead, I had a very fun job for a few years, got the career development I was looking for, and learned financial discipline.

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Fail often, fail fast and fail better

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Distinguished Engineers (E9) at Meta make $4m/year. That's 16x the Bay Area median ($255k) Let's break it down [output = input x leverage] We all have 24 hours in a day, so there is a cap on [input] But hey, let's say they manage to have 2x-3x more focused time, so their [input] is 2x-3x There is still 5.3x-8x to go And that's [leverage] Here is the [leverage] they have: 1️⃣ Writing Every piece of text they write is clear to everyone, and they write a lot, for a lot of people 2️⃣ They create something from nothing And that something has clear value to the business 3️⃣ They influence other Engineers around them They are often described as having a "Midas Touch" in terms of their ability to uplift and develop other Engineers around them The best indicator is that the Engineers in their teams get promoted faster 4️⃣ They are well known and have an impact beyond Meta, promoting the brand 5️⃣ They have industry-leading experience in some areas There are rumoured to be <50 E9s at Meta

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I first joined Amazon in December of 2005. Even though I left for two years, my "Amaversary" still coincides with the end of the year and a natural moment for reflection. As I reached my 17 year mark this December, I also had the privilege of working with Amazon Careers to share some of my journey and thoughts about individual contributor technical leader and people manager career paths. In my ruminating, I put together far more content than could be used for a single article. So, I've decided to post here as a series of Q&As - in case others might find my observations, experiences, and perspectives interesting or useful. Below is the first of 6. 1. 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙡𝙮 𝙨𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙧 𝙟𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙮; 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙤𝙣 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙧 𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙨, 𝙄𝘾 𝙫𝙨 𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙧? I started my career as a software engineer 25 years ago. I've worked for startups, enterprise companies, and 7 different organizations over 17 years and two tours at Amazon. I've written firmware for robotic camera mounts; built highly scalable distributed systems; designed restaurant marketing, ordering, logistics, and operations software; created automated test harnesses for mobile games; tested HD DVD encoding; helped launch grocery delivery to customers around the globe - just to name a few of the many cool things I've had the privilege to work on. I've been an entry-level software engineer, a technical lead of teams, a software manager on a couple of occasions, chief software architect reporting to a CTO, and (for the last few years) Amazon Principal Engineer directly supporting a VP with about 200 engineers within my remit. I first became a manager because I mistakenly thought it was the only way to continue growing as a leader, and in many ways I failed. I learned some very humbling lessons about leadership through that experience, which I used to be a better individual contributor technical leader on my path to Senior Engineer. My second time as manager was because my organization had a need that I could fill. I had grown enough as a leader that this time I was much more successful. I said yes to an opportunity that started with managing a small team through delivery of a complex and critical project. Once I grew a high performing team that delivered that initial project, I took on more scope and expanded into multiple teams. After a couple of years of success growing and investing in my teams so that we could deliver greater value to our customers and business, I decided to prioritize being close to my family. For me, at that time, it meant giving up my people management role and returning to the role of an individual contributor technical leader that supports a globally distributed organization. Even though I really enjoyed my time as a people manager, there is no better job for me than that of a Principal Engineer. #amazon #careerdevelopment #technicalleadership #peoplemanagement

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In a few days, I'll have spent 10 years at Amazon. Why do I stay? I had a job satisfaction rubric when I started here:  1. Peers  2. Manager  3. Compensation  4. Subject Matter I thought that if I could hit all of these I'd be happy--and for the most part I have hit them; and I've been happy. But as my career progressed I noticed something new that was missing from my rubric: for the first time I was able to be my authentic self--and that self was successful! As time has gone on, I've come to value this one aspect above the original four. Reflecting on my tenure, me from 10 years ago would be shocked by the this post's opening. When I applied, I was convinced I'd never be hired; and when I was hired, I was convinced that I'd never see my sign on RSUs vest--I had done my homework and was aware of the short median lifespan. But the anecdotes I was quickly amassing were at conflict with everything I thought I knew about Amazon. My manager had been there 10 years, a couple of my peers 5, and I never saw anyone crying at their desk (much to the relief of my parents). Rather things went well. My first surprise was to discover that my coworkers universally did what they said they'd do. More so, what I naturally did was often right, whether that was disagreeing in a meeting, or diving deep into some bug in a service I did not own; I was rewarded for following my instincts. This lead to my own personal virtuous cycle: the more I was myself, the more encouraged I'd be to be that self. Of all the satisfaction criteria, this is the one that keeps me excited to stay and continue growing. This leads me to be super curious about others. What keeps you where you are? (10 year cake is--of course--a figment of AI) #amazon #careers

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Why Amazon changed their RTO Policy * Increase speed and ownership -> IC:Manager ratio change * Increase invention, collaboration, and culture -> In-Office 5 days a week Is this really why tho? Why Amazon is Enforcing a 5-Day Return-to-Office - according to a former AWS Engineer - https://lnkd.in/eRGmpNij #rto

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** Unfortunate Experience with Amazon: Seeking Guidance ** On March 30, 2024, I placed an order with Amazon for a Boat neckband and Boat earbuds. While the neckband arrived in good condition, the earbuds turned out to be defective upon receipt. Naturally, I initiated a return order, and the defective earbuds were collected on April 19, 2024. However, over a month later, I'm still awaiting my refund. Each time I reach out to customer support, I'm told an investigation is ongoing, and worse, I've been accused of potentially returning a different item. Despite their agent verifying and collecting the item, I continue to face delays and blame for an issue that's beyond my control. I filed a complaint on the consumer portal, only to receive a response stating that the product wasn't returned, despite confirmation from their own agent. Here's an excerpt from their communication: "Dear Sir, On review of your complaint and on the information received from the third-party seller we find that you have not returned the product delivered to you vide Order Id 403-8363294-1083540. Accordingly, neither refund nor replacement order can be initiated. Please note that the seller initiates refund only after receipt of the original product as per return policy. Further, it is submitted that our role is limited to that of an intermediary and we are not the seller/manufacturer of the products listed on our e-commerce marketplace. The products listed on our e-commerce marketplace are sold by independent third-party sellers. In view of the above, the issue stands closed. Thank You." I find myself at an impasse and seek your guidance. What steps would you recommend I take next in this scenario? Your insights and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. #CustomerService #AdviceNeeded #AmazonExperience #boat

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I found this post pretty insightful (in terms of qualifying the differences), though I think it misses what the difference actually is When you're interviewing someone for 45 minutes, what kind of data can you get? Can you really conclude this person is going to be a good leader? Or are you simply measuring how well the person can bullshit? Coding & problem solving, on the other hand, cannot be bullshit They are a good predictor & signal of actual real-world performance (at least, how good of a coder & problem solver the person is) Whereas if you interview someone & they "seem to be a good leader", what you're actually probably measuring is that they're a really good bullshitter If I had to assign probabilities: A) Probability that a "leadership interview" leads to a hire which is: A good bullshitter: 90% Competent: 20% Hardworking: 20% A good leader: 20% B) Probability a technical/problem-solving interview leads to a hire which is: Competent: 90% Hardworking: 50% A good leader: 20% A good bullshitter: 20% I'll take (B) any day

My Journey to Securing 7 Offers for Management and IC Roles Across FAANG and Startups I’ve been considering opportunities beyond Amazon since 2020, but I was fortunate to be offered enriching experiences year after year, which kept me from making the leap. By early 2024, after laying the foundations for AWS App Studio, I decided to explore other roles within #Amazon. However, I realized that Amazon’s presence in the Bay Area was shrinking, and with its #RTO policies, the management opportunities in #bayarea were limited to just a few roles, none of which aligned with my interests and goals. A combination of limited internal opportunities, and changes in Amazon culture and policies, motivated me to explore external options. Initially, I had two interviews with a FAANG company and a startup, but I failed them miserably. Securing new interviews proved difficult due to factors like scarce roles, high competition, and increasing expectations in both technical and people-management skills. I quickly realized I needed to make every interview count by preparing more methodically and strategically. In a future post, I’ll dive into how I: a) Adjusted my job search to land new interviews consistently b) Staggered my interview timeline to maximize preparedness and increase the likelihood of receiving multiple offers c) Prepped for technical skills, as many companies now expect managers to be as technically competent as senior engineers I also decided to interview for individual contributor (IC) roles for several reasons: a) I’m still hands-on with my side projects b) Companies are reducing management layers c) I enjoy both IC and management roles d) Compensation for ICs at some companies can be higher than for managers at others e) Since I was preparing for technical interviews anyway, I figured I might as well explore IC opportunities too I segmented my job search into four categories: Startup/FAANG and IC/Management, staggering my applications to focus on startups first and then #FAANG. This approach created an avalanche effect: I started receiving IC and management offers from startups, followed by multiple FAANG offers across both IC and management roles. Here are the benefits of this approach: a) I was able to fairly evaluate startup opportunities without bias toward cash components. One startup came close to winning me over, but by that point, I had FAANG offers and ultimately decided to pursue those. b) I gave myself a chance to objectively reconsider an IC role, as I’m still mid-career c) I ensured that for any managerial role I considered, the company culture and its policies aligned well with my values. d) This approach helped me negotiate effectively and secure a top-of-market compensation package. e) I was at my best in the final interviews (both FAANG and startups) after having multiple real-world practice sessions with other companies.

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A Decade at Amazon - Reflections After a 10-year journey at Amazon, I recently transitioned from a yellow badge to the red corporate employee badge. While there is room for improvement at Amazon, I'm struck by how much I've learned and grown, thanks to Amazon's culture and leaders. In my last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to work across different organizations in stores, AWS, and Alexa as an individual contributor and as a manager in technical program management and engineering disciplines. Some of the most profound lessons that will stick with me include: 1. Following leadership principles unifies a company's culture and boosts productivity. 2. The importance of deep understanding, practice, and insisting on the highest standards. 3. Driving outcomes over empires and being strategically patient yet tactically impatient in pursuing customer obsession. 4. Having an insatiable curiosity and beginner's mindset. 5. Every customer issue represents an upstream process deficiency that needs to be identified and resolved urgently. 6. Prioritizing and tackling the hottest, highest impact items first. 7. Being "green-lighted" doesn't mean risk-free, and transparently calling out risks with projected issue dates. 8. Prioritizing input goals you can control before output goals, and optimizing inputs relentlessly. 9. Goals are directional, not dogmatic, and undershooting or overshooting can be acceptable if customers are delighted. 10. While off-the-shelf solutions can cover 80%, investing in tailored solutions for the remaining 20% is critical. 11. Simplicity, incremental progress, and smart automation are core philosophies. 12. Transparency in prioritization rationale and openness to adjusting the roadmap based on new inputs. 13. Sticking to your strongest points persuades better than attempting to discuss everything. 14. Removing blockers is your responsibility, not someone else's, and committing 100% once a group decision is made. 15. Embracing failures as learning opportunities in complex operations. This enriching decade has been about customer obsession, frugality, ownership, never stopping learning, highest standards, and delivering robust solutions. I'm grateful for the growth I've experienced here.

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I've been at Amazon a long time. When I talk about my career with Amazon, the most frequent questions people ask me are: What kept me with Amazon for so many years? When I left after nearly 14 years, what drew me away? What brought me back 2 years later? The genuine answer to each, as trite as it sounds, is the same: it's the people The people who took a chance on me. The people that, when I struggled, helped me lean on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses. The people who saw potential and invested in me. The people who modeled the value of building relationships, not just building code. The people who challenged me, made me think differently, and helped me grow. As I've grown in my career it's also those people in whom I can see potential and invest, where I might take a chance to give them an opportunity, for whom my experience could be of some value as they grow, and with whom I can continue building lasting relationships. I've been with Amazon's Global Talent Management and Compensation for about a year and a half, where our mission is to help Amazonians build rewarding careers. In that time, I've met with hundreds of people in our org and every single one of them has been driven by our mission and passionate about how we can meaningfully improve the lives of every Amazon employee. I've learned so much about how challenging, rewarding, and important taking a culture-first approach can be. This post isn't a claim that Amazon is objectively unique, I know there are amazing people in every company, though it has been my personal experience that Amazon's intentionally peculiar culture is one that encourages these kinds of behavior in people. Rather, my point is this: To deliver sustained business and customer value, your organization cannot be a feature factory. It needs to be an organizational engine that continuously inspects and adjusts its culture to grow people and relationships, according to your values, and through which you deliver for your customers. #people #relationships #culture #amazon

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After 7 years, last week I said good bye to Amazon Web Services (AWS) 👋 7 years ago, I was working as a project manager but I was secretly dreaming about going to a coding career. Somehow I managed to get in Amazon. I barely knew anything about coding production systems. But being surrounded with some of the smartest engineers I have ever met, I was able to learn, grow and eventually achieve my dream of being called a software engineer. Here are a few fun moments that will stay in my mind forever: - Before my first day, I asked my skip level manager what's the dress code for my first day. He was shocked at first and then told me "do what you want, but never wear a shirt and a tie, that'll be super weird" 👔 - I bought ice cream at 11:59pm just one minute before the store closed while working on a project with a friend. it was the fastest run of my life and eating this ice cream is a moment that I remember as pure joy 🍦🏃 - One day when I was on call, all the on call engineers on the entire floor got paged. Thinking it's a global issue, I am relaxed... Until I see all the on-calls on the floor looking right at me and walking in my direction... The outage was caused by our service and it was my job to fix it 😱 - One night, I wasn't on-call but my pager rang for missing connection... While sleeping, I woke up my wife (who doesn't work at Amazon and has never been on-call) and I told her to go to work. I got screamed at a lot that night... 🫣 But the part that I love the most is that most of the people I worked with, I can now call them friends. So I wanted to to thank all of you, directors, managers, PMs, fellow engineers... And all the others I'm forgetting now. See you soon friends, now it's time for another dream! 👋 PS: Also big thank you for all the devs sharing free content on blog or YouTube and also those writing great books. Your contents were and will continue to be a big part of my growth too!

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The hardest technical decision I made at Amazon wasn't about technology. During a project, an engineering team wanted to rebuild our entire checkout system. I remember, the enthusiast team; "It's legacy code," one of my best engineering colleague said. "We can do it in 3 months." But here's what my Amazon experience taught me to ask: I asked the below Questions: 1/ Why now? 2/ What's the actual pain? 3/ What's the hidden cost? After diving deep (Amazon leadership principle in action), we discovered: - 80% of issues came from 20% of the code - Complete rebuild = 6 months minimum - Migration risks > Current pain What we did instead: 1/ Isolated the problematic components 2/ Created clear interfaces 3/ Rebuilt critical parts first Result: - 70% improvement in performance - Only 6 weeks of work - Zero customer impact The Framework I Used: 1. Pain Assessment - Current impact - Future risks - Resource cost 2. Solution Mapping - Quick wins - Medium changes - Complete rebuilds 3. Hidden Cost Analysis - Migration complexity - Team bandwidth - Customer impact Key Learning: Technical decisions aren't about the newest technology. They're about making the right trade-offs. Early PMs: What technical decisions are you struggling with? Let's solve them together 👇

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In this world of ongoing layoffs, companies going against the grain to build highly customized in-house tech stacks that don't track to the skills and expertise engineers need for their past and future jobs will find themselves becoming a black hole devoid of talent. The ones who are good enough to leave will, and the ones who aren't will feel stuck because their work isn't advancing their skills in a way that adds to their value as an employee.

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While the practice of doing crap pull requests and letting your teammates correct you is questionable, and this whole story might be bogus to begin with, it does strike a chord with me. From my experience, the developers who want to spend weeks reading docs and doing tutorials before writing any code, end up not writing much code in the long run. Jump in, break stuff, ask questions! The best devs will have a PR on the 1st day: fixing some crap sample code, tutorial or how-to that no one bothered to update for a while.

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10x engineer, rock star, brogrammers....these are all unhelpful myths. Were they a great dev? Probably, but a great dev should not have to suffer through ego death to consider themselves successful. I agree with others, this attitude is not how a team succeeds and it is toxic. When I look at Facebook now I see an application stack that constantly breaks, is unintuitive and doesn't have the infrastructure to support itself, worse in quality than it was a decade ago. Exactly the type of thing I would expect from a bunch of individual contributors without cohesion. I'm sure this analysis on my part is unfair and there are dedicated, hard working team members there ready to make a difference, but this type of culture needs to stop. Invest in your internal teams, promote from within, train, encourage, build great things together instead of waiting for an imaginary deus ex programmator to save you.

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Disclaimer - This post is not meant to justify or criticize Amazon's 5 day return to office policy. I am just sharing how this policy affected my decision making. As I come to terms with giving up a house deal I had nearly finalized, I’m experiencing a mix of emotions. The decision was not easy, but it has ultimately led me to reflect on my priorities and the future I envision for myself. The house was a perfect fit in many ways—great location, ample space, and the promise of a cozy home. However, with Amazon’s 5 day return to office policy looming, I realized that my current lifestyle and work dynamics would need to adapt. The thought of commuting 2+ hours daily and adjusting to a more rigid work schedule made me reconsider my choice. While it’s disappointing to let go of a deal I was excited about, I’m trying to view this as an opportunity rather than a setback. It gives me the chance to reassess what I truly want in a home, particularly in light of my work situation. Perhaps there’s a better option out there that aligns more closely with my new routine and professional commitments. This change also encourages me to explore different areas that might offer a more convenient work-life balance. I’m excited about the prospect of finding a place that not only meets my needs but also enhances my overall lifestyle. Ultimately, while I’m sad to step away from this deal, I’m hopeful about what lies ahead. This is a moment to realign my goals and find a home that will support my journey as I navigate this new chapter in my career.

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