Today marks 4 weeks since I started my new job at Amazon as SDE 2 in Dublin so I decided it is a good moment to gather my thoughts and observations in this post.

  • Amazon is all about culture. You may have heard of the Amazon leadership principles. If not, do yourself a favor and take a đź‘€. These are not just words written to inspire. I would say they are deeply rooted in the culture, especially the customer obsession. You can feel it even as a newcomer. I think that is a big reason why Amazon is the beast that it is.

  • Scalability is an issue every day. On many projects that I have worked, scalability was not a super huge problem. It was a nice problem to have. At Amazon, scalability is the nasty problem that haunts you every day, even in 2am in the morning. Same for reliability. Downtime is heresy.

  • It is all about the data. It is amazing to see such a big company to be so efficient. And I attribute that mainly to data being king. It is easy to slip in power games in big companies and make decisions based on subjective factors as “the boss said that”. This is extremely difficult here as data is the main decision driver. If countries were like that, we would live in paradise already.

  • Work from home sucks. Flexibility is a good option but office is a must have in my opinion in some form. Especially for new people, especially for onboarding.

  • Operational excellency is key competitive advantage. It pays off.

  • Can’t escape from legacy software. There was a time when I thought that in big tech they write code that is “book example ready”. Not so naive anymore. I didn’t realize this now, but now I know for sure.

  • Nice and friendly people all around. I was kind of afraid that everyone is super competitive and the work environment is a bit pushy. Not anymore. While people are very professional and ambitious, there is no toxicity. Everyone is helpful and patient. Goals are realistic.

  • Ownership is a thing. I like that a lot. Every team owns a part of the product/process. That has huge implications. There are no questions as “who is supposed to fix that”, “who is in charge of that” etc. At every moment, you know who owns what.

Thanks for reading!