'What Working at Amazon Taught Me About Growth and Engineering' amazon growth
In this article, I want to talk about my experience at Amazon and what I learned about software development.
Not at Amazon, here you are the feature lead just 6-8 months into the job. Of course, there are other mid-level and senior engineers providing you guidance and support but you are yourself responsible for talking to different teams, identifying blockers early on, and reporting them to your manager / sorting them out.
The technical skills are important and describe the HOW of the software development process, the soft skills help us understand the WHY.Some teams at Amazon are notorious for long working hours. Creating and managing a Tier 0 / 1 service with millions of customers and an SLA to stay up and running 99.99% of the time, sometimes bringing long hours and too many SEV 2s.
Too many SEV 2s? The root cause might become a project which should be worked upon. Bringing attention to the stability and performance of a product is also an important job of an engineer..
The right manager is friendly enough that you can open up to them but professional enough to give you constructive criticism from time to time. A manager’s job is a hard one for sure so it’s important to give them feedback from time to time too. Though, if you feel your manager is lacking in some key aspects and there is little to no improvement over time, change teams.