This essay as a strong is based on a conversation transcribed with Steve Yegge, a 56-year-old from Washington, to work in Amazon-founded in 1994 from 1998 to 2005. The following is edited for length and clarity.
When I was still finishing the college, I started working for a software company, and one of my college friends told us the saddest news: she would work on an online bookstore.
It seemed like she would be a librarian, but it turned out she was in something: she was one of Amazon’s first employees.
Later, another friend got up and went to Amazon, saying he received an offer he could not refuse. I started doing around and I was another to leave – I joined Amazon in 1998 as a technical program manager.
I worked on my way and eventually found myself working on a secret project for Jeff Bezos himself. He was a right leader with an incomprehensible magnetism to him, but he did not seem to take care of nothing but his mission. Despite the fact that I disagreed with the company’s practices, Bezos himself was difficult to dislike.
Hard hard to dislike a person who is so smart.
I can say bezos was in something great when I started at Amazon
When I joined the company in the late 90s, Amazon was hiring as crazy. Bezos was on a crazy mission to get very quickly. As soon as I got there, I started interviewing other candidates. Sometimes, I was planned for two interviews at the same time, so I would run back and forth between the rooms to ask them questions.
Amazon’s office was unlike the conventional atmosphere of the beginning I was used to. The building was upset and the offices were dark and bold.
Despite this, after you get into the building, there was a crack in the air. You can feel that something really great was happening – and everything was focused on Jeff.
I have worked in many parts of the company, including a secret project for Jeff
To be hired at Amazon, I asked my friend who left before me to give my resume. After interviewing, I was set up in the technical program management organization. My task for the first year was to help coordinate the projects that went through numerous teams.
Then, I spent approximately two and a half years in the customer service tools and headed the engineering team for one and a half at that time. The crazy things would happen in that part of the company: there would be transport errors, and we would send people extremely wrong, but then we would go on board trying to do the right things for the client. We had all the best stories. I then became an engineering manager in the developer tools.
At the end of my time in Amazon, Jeff asked me to work on a secret project. He was always dreaming of things and assigning tasks that seemed impossible. The project was supposed to be something like Reddit.
I didn’t know enough for the scattered calculation to attract what Jeff wanted in his desired frame. I felt the project was not possible at the time, but I was scared to deliver that message Jeff.
Meanwhile, Google offered me a great package, so I left Amazon in 2005 to work there.
I didn’t like to work in Amazon, but I really liked Jeff
Jeff was a very hands leader. He would often come to our customer service meetings and look at the data showing why customers were contacting us.
I have worked under other CEOs, including Larry Page to Google and Eric Schmidt, and they usually did not attract older employees for makeshift conversations, but Jeff would do so often. He would restore us and change how everyone in the company thought about things.
He challenged people every day, but I never saw him crazy or swear in my nearly seven years there. He had this electric presence, a magnetism to him that was incomprehensible.
However, I discovered that Amazon could be a terrible place to work. I am still a client and I do not boycott them because of their practices, though I disagree with some of them.
As I worked in Amazon, there was this pressure that everyone had to work all the time, and people avoided looking for rest time. Some employees would do others. A friend of mine worked in a closet because this is the only place where there was room for a table.
From what I could show, Jeff is a heard-not-bad, watched-not-evil person who was a mission-focused. It didn’t matter if the toilet was polluted or if the engineers were lining up all night. He seemed to care only if he began to slow it down. Maybe this is the type of leader you need to be. Successful leaders receive no response.
Work with Jeff and his governing team was normally calm and serious with a sense of urgency, as in a war room. People were very careful with their words about him. When people raised concerns about him, he would sometimes laugh on their faces.
I felt like Amazon employees could never say if something bad was happening in Amazon. You can be brave and raise issues, but you were swimming against the stream.
In 2011, years after I left Amazon, I accidentally publicly shared a private post on Google and Amazon, where I described Jeff as a control attack. The post exploded and made it to the Wall Street Journal. I heard through the grape that Jeff was aware of the post and laughed at her.
Jeff was liked, so I was happy to hear that he was not angry. He constantly encountered as quiet and interested in everything everyone should say. He was not afraid to ask questions or look ignorant. He was never hard to work with, though it could be hard to work ABOUT Sometimes because of his super high expectations.
He tries to keep things very true, and it is very difficult to dislike someone like this.
In response to the Business Insider request for comment, a spokesman for Amazon said, “Business Insider refused to share the information needed to verify this individual’s account from over 20 years ago.” They added, an “anecdote from a person is not a representative of what was like working in Amazon then or how it is now.”
Bi reached the representative for Jeff Bezos but received no response.
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