"The mission of the Amazon Developer Platform team is to accelerate Amazon.com shopping experience development via empowering and delighting developers."
Ugh. I hate that everything has to be delightful now.
Ugh. I hate that everything has to be delightful now.
I want... the development experience to be delightful
So I can... be delighted
So I guess I like some of that stuff now that I've listed it all but I was never really delighted, maybe just happy I could get a coke with my burger.
I guess to delight me I need magic doorways and 1920s era Santa Claus (none of this post modern stuff where Santa is a trained killer who enslaves elves or stuff, I don't like it)
Too many places have horizontal silos, elaborate bureaucratic policies, throw it over the wall mentality
It's surprising some places pay engineers so much to fill out e-paperwork all day
While looking you dead in the face and saying "we've broken down all of our silos". Current job is this way.
"We are all DevOps"
Yet only one person is allowed to deploy, build pipelines, and provision resources.
No one's broken down any silos, they just changed the name on the land deed and kept the silos where they are.
If you aren't the sort of person to feel any sort of "delight" about good tools, then the job probably isn't a good fit for you because the responsibility of the job is to build tools.
A professional can be perfectionist (in a good, not procrastinating way) and hold high standards to their work about creating good tools. Perhaps this is captured by 'delight,' but the language seems phrased in a way that 'delight' means showing positivity, bright energy, and explicit enthusiasm for work.
I think it's better for both the individual and the organization when there's a certain level of detachment with the work (so there's commitment to perfectionism but not super high enthusiasm that can be lead to burnout and health problems), but still high standards to ship a good product.
Every decision was made according to some arbitrary dogma about consistency or some other abstract CS principle. The manager was explicitly against sourcing any feedback from the teams we served when determining our priorities and roadmap. The result was tools that were essentially unusable, and endless refactoring from one tech stack configuration to another without actually solving any real-world problems.
For me, burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work. I agree with the general consensus that delight is an awkward word to use here, but it does at least signal that the team is run with a user-first mentality.
> burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work
This is a lesson I was grateful to have picked up from HN about a year ago. The thread is at [0], and the quote from the submitted article was:
“Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.”
This helped motivate a personal decision to leave a job where initiative and extra effort wasn’t noticed or rewarded (despite planning to stay a while due to inertia), and only seek work where I’m empowered to do the best work I can. I plan to avoid mistaking my identity for my job position at a company, but I would like to similarly aspire to be a professional who cares about doing good work for the user (versus just clocking in).
There's too much content now, and it's a race to the bottom as every piece tries to gain attention.
[0] (Paywalled, but to cite the source) https://www.ft.com/content/f4006248-eb05-49d2-a938-d70118c4c...
- Charles Crumb