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phnofive

Wasn't clear to me who wrote this or why, so:

> I’m Colm MacCárthaigh, a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, and this website is my blog.

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He's been on HN for ages

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=colmmacc

He's an extremely good Twitter follow, for what it's worth.

> a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services

Any further translation on what VP and "Distinguished Engineer" means here? It sounds like both of them are honorary and doesn't really mean much, but then "Distinguished" makes it seem they received some sort of Nobal price of computing as well.

And if neither of them really mean anything, then this guy is really "just" a developer right?

In the org I work in "Distinguished" is simply a level of seniority (and pay grade). For engineers we have; grad -> engineer -> senior -> specialist -> principal -> chief -> distinguished.

The further/higher you get you usually do less "programming" and more design/architectural, plus line management.

Distinguished Engineer is the top “level” for engineers at Amazon. It’s equivalent to a VP position for managers. So it’s a job title, similar to Sr Engineer.

Colm is an extremely smart engineer who has designed some really big systems. Distinguished is the title they give you when they want to pay you VP bucks so you stay at Amazon.

In my non-Amazon experience, VP (Vice President [of something]) was a position in corporate hierarchy; Distinguished Engineering a technical-track recognition of long-term achievement, more an accolade like you say (but probably with some compensation-based recognition I imagine).

> And if neither of them really mean anything, then this guy is really "just" a developer right?

Probably yeah, he went to a coding boodcamp and was hired after that.

Colm is a fairly badass engineer. He was a senior principle when I left. Sounds like they made another level since then and he jumped into VP. Somewhat makes sense as he leads the business in both a technical and business sense. Amazon’s traditional issue is they only know how to level managers. Turns out when the company starts accruing some really senior people you have to accommodate them.

This is a fairly fluffy piece of writing. His internal writings were much deeper.

Amazon has long had a VP-level engineer track (Peter Vosshall was the first IIRC). Colm is very rightly one.

Long in Amazon years. I departed five or six years ago and Senior Was the end of the road. Similar to how leveling a research scientist was voodoo.

That's not correct. There were Principal and higher engineers 13 years ago when I joined. 5 years ago, just EC2 had a fairly large number.

Positions past senior have existed much longer than 5 or 6 years at Amazon.

What does '"just" a developer' mean?

I specifically put quotes around it to avoid comments like you. "Just" in terms of superfluous titles, not that becoming a developer is easy or anything. Seems I've managed to get my answers though, so thank you everyone (except argc)!

Yes, a developer title basically. But very senior

Comp is $950K++++ per year range.

I’m sure he has exceeded this by now. If you can afford to keep genius around then you should.

It’s hard to get familiar with engineers at Amazon. They have spokes persons who release things written by others and their external contribution process is difficult at best.

It isn’t a surprise people think he is a nobody. I still remember him after five years.

Really? Looks like someone's blog on technical things that they're interested in and there's an 'About' link right where you'd expect that tell you who they are.

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