Had the pleasure of working with ex Amazon engineers through visual effects, art tools and YC as a first employee working directly with two ex Amazon Founders.

The founders had a strong engineering mindset and appreciation for walking a line of being frugal but never frupid...

The mindset and culture where clearly deep that they brought many learnings over to their new startups and their engineering lives beyond amazon, we practiced a silent meeting over a document i wrote for the interview as well as over my research ideas and architecture plans, they both stayed heavily involved in the details.

Had a hackathon style event within Amazon for effectively finding open source projects to incorporate into AWS like elastic search which has undergone some scrutiny but in my mind is strong business sense and common practice.

Amazon managed to deeply invest more than other big tech incl manufacturing automations, when others have been hoarding cash to their detriment, generally congrats to Bezos and the team for pushing the fronteirs of business and now space forward.

The engineering culture at Amazon is deeply rooted in its leadership principles, particularly "Dive Deep" and "Bias for Action." From my observations working with ex-Amazonians, these weren't just wall decorations – they were deeply ingrained habits that followed them to their next ventures.

The famous "working backwards" approach, starting with the customer and writing a press release before building anything, was evident in how these founders approached problem-solving. Every technical decision began with "How does this benefit the end user?" rather than "What's the coolest technology we could use?"

One of the most distinctive aspects of Amazon's engineering culture is their document-driven decision making. The "six-page narrative" isn't just a quirky Amazon tradition – it's a powerful tool for deep thinking. These documents force engineers to clearly articulate their proposals, anticipate questions, and consider edge cases before writing a single line of code. The silent reading period at the start of meetings, which I experienced firsthand, ensures everyone is actually engaging with the content rather than just skimming.

Amazon's approach to technical debt is particularly interesting. While they're famous for being frugal, they're strategic about where they invest heavily. Their "two-pizza team" structure keeps teams small and autonomous, but with clear interfaces and service-level agreements between teams. This has enabled them to scale enormously while maintaining agility.

The culture of operational excellence is another standout feature. Every engineer is expected to be on call for their services, following the "you build it, you run it" philosophy. This creates a powerful feedback loop – engineers who know they'll be woken up at 3 AM for problems tend to build more reliable systems.

Their engineering practices have influenced the entire industry. The concept of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" led to AWS, which revolutionized how we think about infrastructure. Their internal tools often become products – like Amazon's approach to observability becoming AWS CloudWatch, or their deployment practices evolving into AWS CodeDeploy, they used internal tools different to AWS which can lead to some frustration common in other big tech companies too. Theres a flexible lambda style system behind running the Amazon website. 

What's particularly impressive is how these practices scale. From two-person startups to teams of thousands, the core principles of writing things down, thinking deeply about problems, and maintaining high operational standards remain effective. The founders I worked with demonstrated this by applying these practices at our much smaller scale, proving that good engineering culture isn't about size – it's about mindset.

The focus on metrics and data-driven decision making is another key aspect. "You can't improve what you can't measure" isn't just a saying at Amazon – it's a way of life. Every significant engineering decision needs to be backed by data, whether it's performance metrics, customer behavior, or operational costs.

Perhaps most importantly, Amazon's engineering culture emphasizes long-term thinking. Jeff Bezos's famous quote about being "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time" reflects in their engineering approaches too. They're willing to make substantial investments in infrastructure and automation that might not pay off for years – like their early investment in warehouse robotics or their development of custom silicon.

This long-term mindset, combined with their relentless focus on customer value and operational excellence, has created an engineering culture that continues to influence the industry long after engineers leave Amazon. It's a testament to the strength of these principles that they remain valuable even in completely different contexts, from small startups to different industries entirely.

Congrats to Amazon, lots of talented engineers there, and yall are real dumb btw for return to office and frupid for not having not good coffee machines/facilities at work.

Wish yall talented folks that work there all the best, esp in their ongoing hunt for open source projects to use in AWS.