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JACOB PEDDICORD OPINIONS

@jpeddicord | contact


AMAZON'S DAY 2 2020-06-10

> Hey! Before you read the post below, take a breather and acknowledge that
> there are a lot worse things going on right now. Please support your black
> friends and neighbors.
> 
> Amazonians, know that Amazon is currently matching donations to a series of
> causes supporting racial equity. Ask your coworkers for the link.

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Today is my last day at the 'zon.

I've been writing this post slowly over a month and a half or so. At first I had
a lot to say, then I wanted to say nothing at all. But now, I feel like writing
something. If only for myself, but maybe also for others to read when they find
out I don't work there anymore.

Anywho. This is an opinion piece, and it's my own work experience from my own
perspective.


WHY?

This is a tough question I have to reason about myself.

I suppose it helps to tell you where I did work: I was a senior software
developer in our lovely little Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). I really
liked working with my team, open source communities, and developers across the
company. I liked what I did and the challenges that came up. I was originally
not planning on staying in one place for more than a couple years, but here I
went and stayed almost five on one team. Nothing really wrong with that, I
guess; every time I thought "this will be the last thing we need to solve" --
but of course, there's always more work.

The team's in a healthy shape now. I'm confident they'll survive fine. Why I
left has nothing to do with my work, my team, or my management, or even open
source at all: It has everything to do with Amazon.

This is where I had a whole bunch of stuff written up. But then, Tim Bray
published his own post:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
(see The Guardian write-up if unavailable)

I've been thinking strongly of leaving since mid-April, and then I saw that post
myself and it really resonated. It wasn't anything new to me (or to others I
know at corporate) but it just echoed so many thoughts I've been having. And
that's just one aspect of where Amazon has been going lately.

I had been thinking of things that made me stressed at work over the past year.
Very few stress factors related to my team; again, I liked the work! Most of the
times where I just really had to stop and think "am I really working here" were
when executives decided to push things down from the top. There was another one
of these recently, and it was pretty closely tied to what's been happening.

And I just had to think to myself: Why do I put up with this? Why do I work for
a company that makes me go through all of these mental gymnastics? I guess it's
because I was paid decently well and liked my work. But I realized that I can't
keep doing this -- I can't keep having these debates in my head about what
Amazon's going to try to pull against its employees this month or next.

I'm just done. And once I realized that, I felt so... resolute. It's been a few
weeks since that realization and my thoughts haven't wavered. I do feel a little
sad, and disappointed, but I don't feel too stressed. Time to close this
chapter.

If you still work at Amazon and like your job, by all means keep working there.
I'm not taking some big stand, and I won't judge you if you still enjoy your
work. It's just no longer for me.


DAY 2

So what's Day 2? The Fool has a write-up on it, based on shareholder memo from
Jeff.

I want to re-iterate that this is my opinion, but I know others share it:

I don't think I was looking at past years with rose-tinted glasses. I think
Amazon was in a state of "day 1" for quite some time. I'm not sure when things
moved to day 2, but it's for sure here. It's almost a meme in emails/chats at
work: see something bad Amazon's doing? Shake your head and wonder when things
slipped; day 2 is here.

On the tiniest chance some executive reads this: Listen to your employees. Your
gut reaction to complaints should not be "let's shut this down", it's "how do we
fix this". We've got this whole COE process for rooting out technical mistakes
and finding a root cause. Halting communication and disciplining employees does
not find or fix a root cause, it very poorly attacks a symptom.

Perhaps what's been the most eye-opening for me, is that once I put in my
two-week notice and started to tell people about why I was leaving, everyone I
spoke to was very understanding and aware of all of the above, and described
similar conflicted thoughts.

Last week I was sent my "exit interview", which really was a form of canned
responses and drop-downs. Not a text-box in sight. It wanted me to pick my
reason for leaving from pre-selected reasons. 2 of the reasons were "personal
issues". The rest were structurally set up to reflect badly on someone else,
mostly management. None of that applied -- I attempted to escalate that to HR
but didn't get a response. So, Amazon HR, this post right here is my exit
interview.


WHY NOW?

This wasn't some kind of COVID-19 "snap". COVID sucks and I hate that it
happened, but I was actually feeling refreshed by the prospect of working from
home. It's peaceful. Amazon's at least getting that aspect right and adapting.
Even though I'm leaving, I ordered myself a desk just to work from home in a
dedicated room. I'm gonna make that my WFH/remote work place.

I didn't leave a few weeks back because, frankly, I had a stock vest that was
financially significant for me and it was only a couple weeks out. That has now
completed.


HOW'S OPEN SOURCE DOING OVER THERE?

Pretty good really. Anyone who tells you that Amazon doesn't do open source,
inside or outside of the company, is being willfully ignorant and perpetuating
an echo chamber.

I'm serious. We weren't as loud as other companies about what we did for a
while. We've certainly slipped in places. But if you're a developer at Amazon
(or considering Amazon), I hope that you know that you can do open source work
there. It's not hard. You don't have to "know" someone or do things in secret.
Just talk to the open source team. They wanna help, really. Nobody at the OSPO
comes into work and goes "time to ruin some dreams", because they'd burn out
real fast.


WON'T YOU MISS FREE PRIME?

Hah, good one.

The only thing I'll miss is Chime. (That was another joke.)


WHERE TO?

I don't know yet. I've certainly made a bunch of professional connections and
I'll reach out to some folks soon. I do intend on staying in the industry, most
likely still in open source (program offices or otherwise). But I do have other
interests like Rust, big ol distributed systems, containers, gaming... I like a
lot of things.

However, I do plan on taking a month or two off to just do nothing in
particular. It's still COVID time, but it'll be nice to have nothing I must do
for a short while. I'll go hike, and camp.

I am looking for:

 * Something remote, or Seattle + work-from-home friendly. I live on the
   newly-formed Island of West Seattle, so a downtown/eastside commute isn't the
   best but I'd consider it.
 * A tech/engineering role as an individual contributor. I'm a chatterbox, but I
   do not want to be a manager.
 * Something relatively senior. For those that know the lingo, I was Amazon
   "L6".

The nice thing about straight-up quitting my job is I have a lot of time to
think about these things and really consider the right place. I might find it
quickly, or it might take some time. I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate that
I had a job that paid well and I don't have to stress about finances for a
while. I hope everyone else in tech realizes this, too.


FREE TIME

I'm gonna use this time to try some hobbies I never really got into. More
creative stuff. Things I reasonably should have been able to do while working
but... always found excuses:

 * Papercrafts. I have 3 up in my house now (a dragon, a fox, and another dragon
   -- shut up, they're cool)
 * Learning to draw. I've always sucked at it and I've always admired concept
   art for shows, movies, games.
 * Streaming? Video games! This is unlikely to go anywhere useful but... why
   not?
 * Catching up on reading.
 * Open source projects, a little bit. I am mostly going to take this time to
   just "reset", and as my full time job was open source itself, it might be
   better to step back for a short while.


PHONE TOOL HIGH SCORE

I feel like the Amazon "phone tool" is basically your collection of your
achievements, silly or not, and I'd like to keep mine. I know that profiles get
"deactivated" and most of the content is hidden. Here's mine.



Ah, phone tool icons. Some day they'll become AMZN stock, right?

Comments? Tweet at me.

Copyright Jacob Peddicord. Content available under CC-BY-4.0 unless otherwise
noted.