Fnord.

Interesting, this. A thought-provoking list of tips from Amazon on how they succeeded. I particularly agreed with this one, having had some uber-stoopid interviews in my time:

Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.

I really agree with that one! There are other gems, too:

Only way to manage as large distributed system is to keep things as simple as possible. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design. Cut technology to the minimum you need to solve the problem you have. It doesn’t help the company to create artificial and unneeded layers of complexity.
…
People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.

Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.

The whole thing merits a close read IMHO. Good stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Essays - other people, Reviews and recommendations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.