Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere. Employees who feel they are not valued find a new job elsewhere. If you can find them a new job in the company you can have them train their replacement - years later the replacement can ask "do you remember why you did...". It also means if the old project has an emergency you have a bunch of people who can jump in much faster - to some extent this adding people to a late project won't make it latter (only some extent, it isn't perfect).
People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
> The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere.
But this one didn’t. 20 years at one place, at least 10 with minimal support. Maybe all those managers were bad; but maybe they realized this individual wasn’t a flight risk, and had a reasonable strategy for maximizing what they got out of them, since they knew they didn’t have to guard against departure.
I think most managers prefer the status quo; why wouldn't they? Charitably, you can think of it as an assumption on the manager's side that you're fine with the way things are, because you haven't said anything. Similar things can be said about salary.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
From my experience it is futile to ask for any meaningful salary changes. Bands are usually fixed. Unless you're severely underpaid, they won't increase your salary by much. There are only two ways to increase your salary: leave for bigger salary, or threaten to leave and stay for bigger salary.
yeah this is exactly it - 'oh we cannot raise you as we have to be fair to everyone else becuz you are at the higher end of the band, unless we promote you but we wont' - sometimes its equality vs merit, no matter how well you do, its still discretionary unless you are in a place where there is a formula, like sales.
I've seen companies that do and companies that don't. I've actually had managers try to dissuade me from growing my scope of work or growing my career. "I don't know why you'd want to be promoted to manager, just stay an IC" was a common phrase to push back against my expressed desire for career growth. Definitely happens. Lots of companies erect career-ceilings over you.
Honestly great work, but this is very much something where the results matter more than the product. It ends without a single comment about whether it worked in Production.
How are they measuring the success rate? It seems like a project like this is a great time to dive into the problem and define the parameters of success. If only to inform how you design the ai’s presentation of the shop. Ie. how quickly does it get customer’s profile and discover their issue.
Thinking about my experiences with mechanics shops—with the exception of dealerships and larger operations—if you’re talking to a principal, the conversation is brief. It’s possible customers will respond positively if the bot is effective for scheduling and if the price communicated by phone, and the final price are somehow aligned to expectations.
Given MCP is supposed to just be a standardised format for self-describing APIs, why are all the features you listed MCP related things? It sounds more like it's forced the enterprise to build such features which cli tooling didn't have?
mostly by virtue of being a common standard. MCP servers are primarily useful in a remote environment, where centralized management of cross-cutting concerns matters. also its really useful for integrating existing distributed services, e.g., internal data lakes.
I think it's clear a self-describing CLI is optimal for local-first tooling and portability. I personally view remote MCP servers as complementary in the space.
When I started my career I heard people say almost verbatim "Stack overflow is making junior devs useless", with the idea all we did was copypaste scripts over. The same people failed, and the same people who can use the tools will succeed now.
You definitely did see a difference between people who just copy pasted from stack overflow, and from people with good fundamentals. The uncomfortable truth though, is that the industry didn't need good coders, it needed a bucket load of basic web apps and it needed bums in seats.
I think the irony of AI is going to be that it will make the remaining software jobs properly hard again, and implementers (ex coders) will be able to succeed with even less code knowledge than before.
I worked under people who started as juniors that way but were politically savvy. Or just ruthless. And pushed their way to the top by stealing projects, lying through their teeth, and other such tactics.
They were slowing down progress because their methods involved sabotaging the progress of others because it might make their own contributions shine a little less.
They were the cause of using libraries like leftPad all through business critical code, and cutting anyone down who dared to simply question why.
These things cause ripples. The smartest and most capable staff leaves, what results is a churn of the same kind.
But hey, they get a trip to Mexico every year and burn through millions every two years. Profit any day now.
It feels wild to have to keep reminding people, but AI changes very little. Tools have always had a variety of output, and ways to control this, and bad tools output a lot by default, whilst good tools hide it behind version of "-v" or easy greps. Don't add a --LLM or whatever, do add cleaner and consistent verbosity controls.
This is the answer. If you provide internet access to someone, you're responsible for it. It's a generally established law from a Torrenting PoV, so isn't it equally applicable to downloading content unsuitable for children. Sure it'll destroy offering free wifi, but that always was tricky from a legal PoV around responsibilities.
I genuinely just don't use the Start Menu anymore. It cannot find anything, and every search will include two Internet results (Bing only of course) and a Microsoft Store reference.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
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