Amazon search was down

Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty? I have no idea what that means.. or how to change the conceptual impression.

In that situation, and especially at scale, it's very useful to keep everyone on the same page about what actions are happening when, and to help folks out by showing them how to find things which may have changed (keep in mind the change may have been in a totally different system than the one that ultimately breaks). For example: it would slow things down if someone tried to flip data centers at the same time that someone else was rolling back software.

If on a call it becomes clear that a team needs to make some kind of non-rollback change, like a code change, or push a new config, and thankfully that's very rare, we'll generally recommend they break off and work on it in isolation, while nominating a point person to liaise with everyone else. We do use chat too and that can be more effective as more people join.

For postmortems we try hard to do in writing first, and then an in person review. It's very helpful to be able to re-assure and guide each other. I can back up the "Blame the system, not the engineer" guidance others have written about here too.

In a microservices or SOA architecture, services can layer on top of other services, that call more services, that put messages in a queue for handling by yet another service, etc., belonging to different teams. Unwinding this to identify the problem is something that's much faster with a phone call. "Connecting the dots", especially across teams. A technical discussion within a team is likely to take place by chat.

I've participated in a number of tech conference calls over the years, and I've always been impressed with the professionalism: the discussion is calm and focused on identifying the problem and recovering. I think folks strive for the "cool radio voice", the Houston Center Voice like was described in the SR-71 Ultimate Ground Speed Check story: http://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912704...

> Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the " Houston Center voice." I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country's space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn't matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.

Still, some people who do go somewhere else, or are less likely to try Amazon in the future. I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least a multi-million dollar mistake.

If I go to Amazon.com I just go to the search bar and refine from there. So I guess I use their "navigation" in the form of their groupings of features on the left side.

[1] https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of pressure. People are held accountable. But they are held accountable for fixing the underlying issue and making sure the same mistakes aren't made again. I've never heard of someone getting fired for making a mistake. People get fired when the same expensive mistake is made repeatedly by the same person. (And really, based on my experience, that might not even be enough. I think in order to get fired you probably would have to fail to understand the nature of the mistake when everyone else in the room understands.)

But of course the real reason is that Amazon's work environment is basically chock full of shitty middle-managers, many who are adopted from Microsoft or salvaged somehow from better tech companies in the valley.

They even have these leadership principles that are basically a bunch of no-brainers that they force down the employees throats at every opportunity. They use them as a criteria for performance reviews, even before actual hard metrics. Shitty middle managers will keep stressing the leadership principles because (1) that's what they are told to do (2) they need to rate their subordinates on them (3) because these principles are qualitative, the only insurance they have is that they spewed them enough to get through.

Amazon, to sum it up, is just, shitty employees from other tech companies. And dumb/average intelligence follow-the-pack type drones - many who can hardly speak English and are on work visas..and they put many of these terrible speakers as managers!! (Amazon loves cheap labor, and will use it for ANY position possible)

When your leadership principles are sold as prolific and something every employee "should study" (Bezos words') you really can't expect to hire intelligent folk who don't want no-brainer basic business and character traits hamfisted to them as if it is the new work of Plato himself.

[1] https://www.amazon.jobs/principles