Today marks my second anniversary as an AWS employee. Time flies and I’m still having a lot of fun.

After I sold the company I founded in 2019 and parted ways two years later, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I’ve often joked that I enjoy working in open source and in network monitoring so much that I would do it for free, so I still wanted to keep working (although probably not so much with the “free” part). When my friend Spot Callaway told me about an open source opportunity at AWS, I was intrigued. After meeting the amazing people I would be working with, I was eager to survive the AWS interview process (called “The Loop“) and join the team.

I wasn’t sure I would be comfortable at a company with roughly 100,000 times the employees of my small venture, but I find that I really enjoy how AWS is structured. There is a philosophy that teams at Amazon should never be bigger than one that can be fed with two pizzas (“two pizza” teams) and so you feel a lot of autonomy. There is also this idea of “two-way” vs. “one-way” doors. Decisions that can be reversed, i.e. “two-way doors”, can be made quickly and at a lower level, whereas decisions that can’t be reversed require more thought and a higher level approval. The team I’m on, the Open Source Strategy and Marketing team (OSSM “awesome”) is amazing, and the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing imposter syndrome has been working with this group of incredible people (and remember kiddos, it’s not imposter syndrome if you are an actual imposter).

Recently, Michael Coté posted a link on Mastodon to an article written back in 2018 by Luke Kanies on “Why We Hate Working for Big Companies“. Outside of Amazon I’ve only worked for one big company, and that was Northern Telecom. A lot of what he writes about really reflected on my experience at NORTEL, but not so much my experience at AWS. Even though AWS has a hierarchical management structure, in practice it seems very flat to me. I’ve always felt that I have access to my skip-level VP, and Amazon has a culture of escalation so that issues can be resolved quickly. I personally have a lot of autonomy to decide how to best implement our team and corporate goals, and I don’t feel that there is some sort of “central planning organization” dictating what I do.

The late, great Anthony Bourdain once talked about the reason he is did his television show was for the access. He simply didn’t have an easier way to get the experiences he wanted outside of it. I like that, in my role at AWS, I get to work with the organizations that in many ways form the heart of modern open source software, such as the Apache Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation. I get to step up my open source game and grow as a person.

But the main reason I like my job is that I get to work with some amazing customers. I like to think that AWS is the best place for companies, especially startups, to run their cloud workloads, and while that may not be true for everyone it is my goal to help make it true. Prior to our acquisition we were an AWS shop and that was mainly because AWS made it easy for us to get started with using the cloud. I literally get paid to meet with these companies that in many cases are defining their market with innovative products and to help them be successful.

It’s a lot of fun.

These days, especially in technology, nothing is certain, but my plan is to keep working at AWS until I retire at age 65. My hope is that I’ll continue in my current role but there are so many opportunities at AWS that I can explore new things as well. My friend William Hurley has gotten me interested in quantum computing, and Amazon is doing some foundational work in that field with Amazon Braket. I’m still skeptical about the hype around Generative AI but the tools I get to play with at AWS have been more powerful than the other things I’ve tried.

For example, I have a group of friends who get together once a week for lunch. One of them meant to write that this week it was at “my abode” but somehow that got autocorrected to “mime abides”. The image that popped into my head was of Jeff Bridges in his role in “The Big Lebowsky” but dressed as a mime. I wanted to create that picture so I tried it on a couple of GenAI image services and they came up short. I decided to try it on AWS and not only did I get an image I could use, I could send my prompt to a number of different models with just one click and choose the best one.

Yeah – it’s definitely not perfect and I am no “prompt engineer” but to be able to create this quickly and easily served my purpose to make my joke.

When I am asked in interviews what is your biggest weakness, my answer is that I can’t handle a job that requires a lot of rote and repetitive work. I thrive in constantly changing environments, and I am grateful that my job at AWS is such a match for my temperament, and many thanks to my teammates for creating such a great environment in which to grow.

When I announced that I had joined AWS, at least two of my three readers reached out with questions so I thought I’d post an update on my onboarding process and impressions so far.

One change you can expect is that when I talk about my job on this blog, I’m going to add the following disclaimer:

Note: Everything expressed here represents my own thoughts and opinions and I am not speaking for my employer Amazon Web Services.

Back when I owned the company I worked for I had more control about what I could share publicly. While I am very excited to be working for AWS and may, at some time in the future, speak on their behalf, this is not one of those times.

A number of people joked about me joining the “dark side”. My friend Talal even commented on my LinkedIn post with the complete “pitch speech” Darth Vader made to Luke Skywalker in Empire. While I got the joke I’d always had a pretty positive opinion of Amazon, gained mainly through being a retail customer.

I recently went and traced what I think to be my first interaction with Amazon back to a book purchase made in December of 1997. In the nearly 25 years I’ve been shopping there I can think of only two times that I was disappointed with their customer service (both involving returns) and numerous times when my expectations were exceeded by Amazon. For example, I once spent around $70 on two kits used to clean high performance automotive air filters. In shipment one of them leaked, and I asked if I could return it. They told me to keep both and refunded the whole $70, even after I protested that I’d be happy with half that.

It was this focus on customer service that attracted me to the possibility of working with Amazon. When I was at OpenNMS I crafted a mission statement that read “Help Customers. Have Fun. Make Money”. I thought I came up with it on my own but I may have gotten inspiration from a Dilbert cartoon, although I changed the order to put the focus on customers. I always put a high value on customer satisfaction.

I have also been a staunch, and I’ll admit, opinionated, proponent of free and open source software and nearly 20 years of those opinions are available on this blog. Despite that, AWS still wanted to talk to me, and as I went through the interview process I really warmed to the idea of working on open source at AWS.

Just before I started I received a note from the onboarding specialist with links to content related to Amazon’s “peculiar” culture. When I read the e-mail I was pretty certain they meant “particular”, as “particular” implies “specific” and “peculiar” implies “strange”. Nope, peculiar is the word they meant to use and I’m starting to understand why. They are so laser-focused on customer satisfaction that their methods can seem strange to people used to working in other companies.

As you can imagine with a company that has around 1.6 million employees, they have the onboarding process down to a science. My laptop and supporting equipment showed up before my start date, and with few problems I was able to get on the network and access Amazon resources. These last two weeks have been packed with meeting people, attending virtual classes with other new hires, and going through a lot of online training. One concept they introduce early on is the idea of “working backwards”. At Amazon, everything starts from the customer and you work backwards from there. After having this drilled into my head in one of the online courses it was funny to watch a video of Jeff Bezos during an All Hands meeting where someone asks if the “working backwards” process is optional.

Based on my previous experience with large companies I was certain of the answer: no, working backwards is not optional. Period.

But that wasn’t what he said. He said it wasn’t optional unless you can come up with something better. I know it is kind of a subtle distinction but it really resonated with me, as it drove home the fact that at Amazon no process is really written in stone. Everything is open to change if it can be improved. As I learn more about Amazon I’ve found that there are many “tenets”, or core principles, and every one of them is presented in the context that these exist until something better is discovered, and there seem to be a lot of processes in place to suggest those improvements at all levels of the company.

If there is anything that isn’t open to change, it is the goal of becoming the world’s most customer-centric company. While a lot of companies can claim to be focused on their customers without many specifics, at Amazon this is defined has having low prices, large selection and a great customer experience. Everything else is secondary.

I bring this up because it is key to understanding Amazon as a company. To get back to my area of expertise, open source, quite frequently open source involvement is measured by things such as number of commits, lines of code committed, number of projects sponsored and number of contributors. That is all well and good but seen through the lens of customer satisfaction they mean nothing, so they don’t work at Amazon. Amazon approaches open source as “how can our involvement improve the experience of our customers?”

(Again, please remember that is my personal opinion based on my short tenure at AWS and doesn’t constitute any formal policy or position)

Note that with respect to open source at AWS, “customer” can refer to both end users of software who want an easy and affordable way to leverage open source solutions as well as open source projects and companies themselves. My focus will be on the latter and I’m very eager to begin working with all of these cool organizations creating wonderful open source solutions.

This focus may not greatly increase those metrics mentioned above, but it is hoped that it will greatly increase customer satisfaction.

So, overall, I’m very happy with my decision to come to AWS. I grew up in North Carolina where the State motto is Esse Quam Videri, which is Latin for “to be rather than to seem”. My personal goal is to see AWS considered both a leader and an invaluable partner for open source companies and projects. I realize that won’t happen overnight and I welcome suggestions on how to reach that goal. In any case it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun.