VP Expectations of Engineers - Interview With ex-Amazon VP Ethan Evans

Hi, my name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video interview, I got to sit down with Ethan Evans and talk about his career journey all the way from school up until being a VP at Amazon. Early on in Ethan's career, he spent time at startups. And it wasn't until he was at Amazon where his career really started to take off. Ethan had scaled up a part of Amazon's teams to having over 800 reports underneath him. One of the things that Ethan and I really wanted to make sure we could focus on is that from an executive's perspective, right? Some senior leadership, what types of traits and qualities are they looking for in highlevel engineers. So, if that sounds interesting to you, I think it's going to be very valuable to hear his perspective. So, sit back, enjoy, and I'll see you next time. To kick these off, I usually like trying to get people to go through a bit of uh their background. I know your career is obviously uh filled with lots of awesome things. So I I don't know where you'd like to start, but if you're cool with it sort of as early as you can remember where you're like, I want to get into tech and move in this direction. Would you mind giving us a bit of background for how you got to where you are today? >> No, not at all. Um so, uh I grew up on a farm in Ohio, but computers, home computers came into being a thing when I was in junior high. >> Okay. And so I was immediately fascinated with them and I grew up in a university town. It's Oxford, Ohio, which is home of Miami of Ohio, not Miami, Florida. Uh so there was a professor there who is my friend's dad. And he got one of the earliest apples. >> Okay. >> Like an Apple one. >> And of course my friend and I who were like, I don't know 10 or 11 or 12, we just thought it was great for games, >> right? Um, and uh, then I got my own computer in Apple 2 and I started to learn to program. And I guess what you would find interesting given you like the early archaeology of somebody's career is I actually wrote Apple and I said in high school, I said, "Hey, I want to come work for you." >> Oh, no way. >> Where do I need to go to school? And you know, this is still in the days, this is not email. Like I wrote them a physical letter and I got back a physical letter from an Apple engineer that I still have. >> No way. That's >> I still have it. And the first thing that kills me about it, it's so Apple. The ink on the letter is the color of my shirt. Like you had an engineer writing in sky blue ink. Uh which is totally fits in with their design aesthetic. Right. >> Right. And the second thing is he said we hire from five schools. Um Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, all California. And I'm living in Ohio and that sounded very far away, >> right? >> Um uh Carnegie Melon and MIT. And so I uh I immediately ruled out California um because I wasn't, you know, now I think nothing of going anywhere in the world, but as a 18-year-old from Ohio, California seemed like, oh my god, you know, I'd been there once in my life. It seemed very far away. So, I applied to Carnegie Melon in MIT. I was only admitted at Carnegie Melon and that made things really easy. >> Sure. Yep. >> Uh, now the irony of all this is, um, I never worked for Apple. So, I had this dream of work for Apple, but as things evolved, I went to Carnegie Melon. I got my master's degree at Purdue, both of them in engineering. I wanted to do a PhD in robotics and artificial intelligence. I started the PhD at Carnegie Melon which is arguably you know the number one robotics school in the world and my office mate had been there eight years working on his PhD because since they were the number one school they didn't feel any real urge to like help people get to graduation. You were there to you know be a researcher and then you would be a professor. Well I'm like I don't have eight more years of school in me. >> Sure. So there was a startup that was a spin out of Carnegie Melon and I left my PhD program went to the startup and then they were growing super rapidly. It was my first experience with hyperrowth and I switched very quickly to being a manager. Uh and it just happened naturally. I sort of um I was on a project that was mismanaged and I couldn't stand it and I started doing what we would think of as technical program management. like I switched from >> writing software to being a TPM and then that grew into leading a team. And so I'm really uh odd in that I spent less than one year as an engineer post school before I was in leadership. >> That's actually the exact same experience that I had where I had graduated at a startup to to start doing software engineering and they started to grow and they said we need managers. you seem to be able to talk to the engineers like and I'm like I guess sure and yeah it's a it's an interesting experience because it's a very different role and it's not like they give you the the playbook and they say here's all the ways to be a manager. It's just like go figure it out. This is just a brief interruption to remind you that I do have courses available on dome train focused on C. So whether you're interested in getting started in C, looking for a little bit more of an intermediate course focused on object-oriented programming and some async programming or you're just looking to update your refactoring skills and see some examples that we can walk through together. You can go ahead and check them out by visiting the links in the description and the comment below. Thanks and back to the video. Well, I talked to it's really awesome that you say that because I talk to people in my coaching and teaching practice all the time. um you know how many years did you go to school to be an engineer, >> right? >> You've got years of training in this and then they switch you and throw you into management and nobody gives you any training or if they do it's like HR one week on how not to get sued and what not to say which >> Right. >> Yeah. >> That's that's helpful but it's not like that's not going to be the thing that carries what you're doing dayto-day. It's just like the don't mess this stuff up kind of talk. >> Right. And so, um, I think a lot and I I remind engineers and all sorts of other people I work with a lot. Number one, if you go into management, understand you're switching careers and you'll need to re-educate yourself, right? >> And number two, if you're struggling with your manager, recognize they are untrained. They were never trained in this, right? You like the sad part and it's universal across industries. managers learn at the expense of their first set of direct reports, >> right? >> Like those people are our guinea pigs. And I don't know about you, I'll check I did some things now, you know, now that I've got 30 years of management experience. I look back at some of the stuff I did my first couple years of management and it's like double face pal like, oh my god. >> Yep. >> You know, um I just did terrible. And it wasn't that I was mean-spirited or anything. I was just ignorant. >> Right. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. I don't like I I like to believe that most people are generally not just like malicious trying to cause problems, but whether it's ignorance or like differences in priorities, like this kind of stuff shines through and then some people have bad experiences with it. But, uh, for me, yeah, it was a very similar type of thing, managing teams. I was also developing software alongside them. And for me, my one of my biggest management missteps early on was just like, I got to write code and then I'm writing code for a couple weeks and I'm like, oh no, I'm not managing the team. I guess I better like completely 180 and do that, not write code. And it was like, how do you how do you do both of these things? Because like it seems impossible unless you're just working two jobs. So, >> well, if you ever solve that, you know, let me know because um I I I have a story I've told before. We'd be jumping forward a lot, but many many years later, I was invited by uh SpaceX to go interview to be VP of software. And by that point, I had let go of personally writing code, >> right? And I I told the recruiter that I said like happy to come down. You know, SpaceX, amazing company. I'd be working directly for Elon Musk. Like very interested. I'm not I am a VP of software who focuses on leading the team. I don't code. Is that cool with you? And he's like, "Oh yeah, totally cool. We need you to, you know, have a technical background, but not that." Fast forward, I get into Elon's office. I've talked to him for about 10 minutes. We're having a good conversation. He says, "By the way, I would need you to code at least 10% of the time." And I'm like, you know, this is an old sound now. Not everyone will get, but it was that sound of a the needle scratching across a record. Like, what? You know, >> I I was very clear, I don't do this. So, it turns out he and his recruiter were out of sync and this was an absolute requirement for him. >> Um, and I I tried to challenge him on it. I I told him like, "Hey, um it doesn't seem like a great idea to have a diloton coder working on a rocket that can blow up, you know, someone like 10% of my time." And and he's a smart man. So he said, "Yes, that's a fine point. Maybe you can work on diagnostics, but I need a leader who's I don't believe in leaders who aren't technically hands-on." And so bottom line was I I had a good job at Amazon. I said we agreed to disagree and I left his office at about the 15 minute mark and as I was leaving he was calling to his assistant to get recruiting on the line like you know and when I you know you always have like a closeout call with the recruiter later the recruiter was pretty curt with me because I'd gotten him in trouble right >> and I'm like dude you flew me down for a job I was never going to fit for like why are you jacked at me >> right yeah well they should have been they should have been on the same page like that seems like a it seems like a pretty important aspect of the job and I can't even for me now like at Microsoft I'm not at a VP level I'm not at director level I'm sort of like the first line of like principal principal band at Microsoft is the first level for that you can be a manager at so I'm I'm sort of the bottom of the leadership level and like I don't code at work um if I absolutely needed to like I write code outside of work every single day so I'm I'm fine I like to code That's cool. But I would imagine if I had to code at work, I could not do my job effectively in terms of leading the team. And I'm not a director. I'm not a VP. And I just feel like the more that you move away from direct hands-on frontline employees coding, the less valuable that becomes personally. Sorry, Elon. Well, you you'll step in it. Like when you publish this, you will definitely have some Elon fans who who come out of the woodwork and say, "I can't work for a leader. I won't work for a leader. I don't respect a leader who's not still hands-on." And and some people do hold that opinion all the way up the stack. Um you know, I was running at that moment. I had uh of that interview, I had a team of 800 people all over the world. And I maybe it's an inadequacy in me. That's why I said if you figure out how to code at work, let me know, >> right? >> Because I didn't I was scrambling to stay on top of leading well. Um, and I I just didn't know how to do that. And I made a choice that said, you know, I can get by. I have, this is part of our discussion. I have principal engineers on my team. I have senior engineers. I don't need to be doing their job. I need to be able to talk to them and understand them. Uh but there are some people who believe that you cannot do that if you're not still hands-on yourself. I disagree with that perspective, but it is one that some people hold very strongly. >> Yeah, I disagree with the fact that you need to be hands-on and uh in terms of technical aptitude, I think the more technical you are, the better off you are at communicating things effectively. So I always try to use my hands and say like if you're talking with very technical people and you are not, they have to do a lot of effort to try and meet you there. and you know kind of goes both ways. So in my opinion the more technical you are working with technical people the easier and more clear the communication becomes. Doesn't mean you have to be coding every day. One of my best leaders that I've worked for was very adamant. He was like I cannot code. Like I think he went to school for engineering but he's like I can't code. It wasn't a relevant field. And he was one of my best leaders because he would dig into things. He'd be very clear about what he doesn't understand. He would try to communicate uh and kind of let you know when you need to kind of go at a higher level and we worked together very well and one of my best leaders >> probably couldn't write a line of code >> well that that I feel I built my skill my career translating tech to non- tech and non tech to tech like that if you look at I think my career had two fundamental attributes my ability to translate between business people and tech and my the the TPM skill set, the ability to get out the door on time or close to on time. Those two things uh I guess I am skipping over and I don't want to keep extending the list. You also had to work with people and lead a team, be able to to manage and motivate a team, which is part of getting things out the door. But I often call myself a TPM in a sense and that that sits in the middle of you have to be technical. The T is technical, but you're there trying to get something done, >> right? Uh so >> absolutely and sorry I know I kind of got you to kind of jump way ahead and talk about some different things but you had mentioned you kind of had almost like fallen into like a TPM type of position started doing some some management. So what did it look like from there and I know there's still a lot a lot of ground to cover. >> Yeah, of course. Well, it moves faster from there. So I was at this rapid growing company. I think when I joined them, they had just gone public and maybe were a little bit over a hundred people and when I left they were 1,400. Um, and so across that growth, my TPM job became a true management job and I learned to love that. I found that technical puzzles are great. Figuring out an algorithm, you know, solving a problem, really interesting, but human puzzles are also really interesting. How do we get these two people to work together? How do we get these two teams aligned? How do we get this all done on time? And I liked human puzzles. I liked hiring. I liked things that were not usual. So that was a startup. I then um moved to another startup. That startup was bought. Uh so I moved to a small startup that was acquired by the early search engine Loss. >> Okay. I remember I remember the name. Yeah. >> Yeah. uh you know not not not a great company in some ways but you know they managed in the internet bubble they managed to sell themselves for4 billion dollars so they did well >> it's not bad yep >> um I left for another startup that was founded by friends and I went through several startup cycles uh spending about 12 years in different startups um and in the last three startups I held VP titles because they pay in titles not in money right so in each of those places I was doing a job probably similar in scope to yours or a little bigger where I was either running a team I was usually running a small collection of teams totaling uh 10 to 30 people. >> Sure. >> So I would have I would have um but like in in one of my startups I think I had six groups because I had like >> QA and technical writing and I had the startup's IT function you know I had all these sort of unusual functions. Um, and one of the things I took an interest in was in several of those companies I ran the recruiting function because I really liked I had gotten into well if you want a good team you have to pick it and build it >> and and um nobody else in a startup nobody wants to run recruiting right because you have like a business found you usually have a business founder who wants to figure out how to make money and you have a technical founder who wants to build the gizmo or the software and like nobody wants you know it's very rare that you have like an HR person as a founder. That isn't normal. So, I ended up doing that. Um, and there's a lot of fun stories there uh like going to um unemployment arbitration and just stuff you wouldn't expect where you know employee disputes. Anyway, then Amazon called me in 2005. Amazon called me. I was living in Boston. The startup I was at had challenges and Amazon uh called me. But this is Amazon before AWS. It's Amazon before the Kindle. They were only they were working on those things in the background, it turned out, but the only thing they were publicly doing was being a books and movies retailer. They really hadn't even expanded to that many categories. But I needed a job and I had been super impressed with their growth. Um, and so, uh, I took the job at Amazon. It turns out that I had a golden job. They had seen some of the work I had done in, uh, streaming media at one of my startups, and they were hiring me essentially to build what is now Prime Video. >> Very cool. Awesome. >> And, and so, of course, we didn't know it was Prime Video. Um, we just had a mandate. Bezos had looked at the world and he realized music, books, and movies are all going to go digital. We'd better be there because, by the way, at that point in time, most of Amazon's revenue came from a division that was called BMVD, which was books, music, VHS, giving you an idea of the times that still existed, and DVD. BMVD. >> For people that are listening and watching, VHS is this thing, >> right? Yes. You may have seen one on your grandmother's shelf, right? It's true. So, 2005 though, that was where the money was. So, I ended up um coming into Amazon to do that, shipping our first few generations of what became Prime Video. It went by different names back then. The first version was a download base. It wasn't even streaming. um it used Microsoft Windows Media Player and you downloaded files with DRM, you know, all sorts of things that >> I don't even know if Microsoft used Microsoft uh Windows Media Player, >> right? Well, they didn't do movies back then. They didn't do other, you know, it was it was like a it was a product for showing little product videos. It wasn't really >> they were just exploring how to make it a a commercial video product. Um and that product, a bug in that product really um hosed me at one point, >> not my team. So that's someone else 20 years ago. Well, what really stunk was um the quick story there is we were trying to demo our product for the first time. Um we were demoing it to the Amazon All Hands. So Bezos is sitting in the front row. Uh we set up the demo before the morning. We paused a movie playing. I had chosen Office Space as like a fun movie. All geeks would know. Yeah. I paused Office Space. We went off stage. They did a bunch of the other stuff. We came back. I unpaused it and on the 40ft screen behind me, it played upside down. It started playing upside down. And you can actually see me. The whole audience laughs. The screen's behind me. I have no idea why. I turn around and see it. And then you can see me bend over to look at it right side up. So the fun part of that story is I turn back around with the mic in my hand and Bezos looking lasers at me out of the front row and like what do you say? Your demo, you know, it's like the famous everyone at Microsoft of course would at least know about Bill Gates and the blue screen of death demo where where Windows blue screened on stage. I kind of had my blue screen moment only I'm not Bill Gates. I'm working for him and he's looking at me. >> Um, it all worked out fine. Uh, you know, I just I owned it and said, "Well, you know, uh, Jeff told us this is our first digital product. It has to just work. Obviously, it doesn't. So, I'm going to go work on that." And then I left the stage. And that was a good enough answer. Um, uh, you know, Jeff was Jeff was okay because he believes in ownership. And the fact I wasn't like hiding behind him and just like I will handle it. >> Yeah. >> Was okay. Um so then I had a just to finish up the career piece at Amazon to grow it's they actually want you to move around not quickly but from time to time so that you get exposure to other leaders and whatever. >> So I was promoted to director. I went as what they call a senior manager kind of what you do. I started with a team of six. I ended with a team of 22 working on video. Then I switched to video games. >> Cool. >> Um, we had bought a video game startup and that startup also had a small online games marketplace where they sold downloadable PC games and I went to run that was my first experience running a P&L. So I started to branch out from engineering leadership to general management running all the different functions. I had done some of that in my startups where I had run these different groups that were all over the place. So I wasn't but what I didn't have was a financial background. So now I owned a P&L. Um the first P&L I owned I remember very clearly it was $4 million and you know at this point Amazon's like a 20 billion company not nearly as big as it is today but it was rounding error. If I doubled the P&L nobody cared. If I cut it in half kind of nobody cared. Uh so it was a great learning opportunity and then um we decided that uh we wanted to build an app store. We had this idea that we could compete with Google on the open Android platform. We we thought it would be open and we could compete. Well, that was a terrible idea. Like they own the platform. It wasn't. But what turned out to work well was we decided to build tablets. And so my big rocket ride at Amazon really came from the fact that we started selling Kindle tablets and I owned the app store and I had to scale up to build a global multilanguage, you know, competitive level app store because we didn't put the Google app store on our tablet. So, we had to like be as good as Google >> or try. We never were, by the way, but we had to be um plausible so that so that uh people wouldn't choose to buy a non Amazon tablet because the app store sucked, >> right? The bar was kind of set by let's say by Google in this case. People are used to this kind of experience. So, you have a different device and they're going, "Well, we expect this type of experience, so you better deliver that." >> Yeah. And so that's what ballooned my team to 800 people was all of a sudden we needed that experience not only in the US in English but in every market around the world able to work in every language around the world able to take payments in every currency around the world. Um >> easy problem to solve, right? Yeah. >> Yeah. And it was it was uh it was a super fun time and that's what catapulted me then to a VP level. And honestly at some level while I grew in skills and was doing a good job most of the time I had the easiest ride to VP in the sense that my team grew so much they couldn't deny I had vice presidential scope. And so then that led to the question, well, do we remove Ethan and put in a VP or is he able to step up? >> Interesting. >> You know, like no one ever said it that way, but there was this that was the choice they had, which is we either have to level in over him or accept that he can do it because he is doing it. And I was lucky enough, you know, to sort of have an advocate in my manager, my my vice president above me who said, "Look, he's doing the job. he's doing it well given the mantle. Um, >> and then to finish out my career, uh, I did that for a while. I had the Elon Musk interview we've already talked about. >> Yeah. >> And, um, then, uh, I moved. Amazon bought Twitch. Amazon bought Twitch TV. And I had loved my work in video games, which I had had to sort of step away from with this app store rocket ride. And I said, you know what? I want to go back to that. So I gave up my entire team um and I joined Twitch as their integration advisor. So I became an adviser to the CEO in a Microsoft term kind of a chief of staff role. >> Okay. >> But my real role I wasn't leading their staff. I was just um my role was to help them figure out what it meant to be part of Amazon as opposed to be totally independent and smooth that journey because many startups turn very septic when they're bought. Like oh everything's different. you're big and bureaucratic and you're telling me I can't go to dinner anymore and bring back a big bar tab and you've got all these rules and they get very angry. I was trying to manage that anger and there is a huge culture clash because Amazon's a very driven focused capitalist company and Twitch was a let's we all love video games a passion company right >> and it was a a big there was a big um uh generational uh disconnect you know I was working for the CEO IT Shear I might have our ages slightly off but I was approximately 44 or 45 and he was 31ish. So I'm working for someone 14 years younger than me. >> If you remember my career, I'm used to being the young manager with everyone being older than me and suddenly the roles are completely reversed. He's the young manager and I'm I'm the going gray guy now, fully gray. >> Uh but I wor I worked at Twitch for five years. I learned a lot about streaming media. And at the same time, I was asking myself, what do I want to do with my life, right? And so, um, you know, what do I want for my second act? And I realized I love to teach, I love to train, I love to share what I know. >> And so, I started building myself towards the career I have now where I left Amazon and I coach, teach, write online. That was all something I began at Twitch uh figuring out how to do. And my first um way to practice that was I started a Twitch stream where I talked about leadership. >> Awesome. >> And that was actually very uh I had to be careful there because big company, I'm sure you have this at Microsoft, you're not allowed to give public presentations without PR approval. Here I was speaking on an open mic to the whole world, >> right? Um, and I very carefully knowing that uh my CEO Emit wouldn't kind of know about this policy or care, I wrote him an email and said, "I'm going to do this. You're okay with it, right?" And he's like, "Yeah, it'll be great. You'll be using our product, you know, go for it." Because I knew PR was going to show up eventually and say, "How are you speaking on open mic?" So, this is one case I I try not to be political, but this is a case where I was very carefully political. Mhm. >> I lined up to have written permission to use our product because I knew they couldn't fight that. They couldn't say like, "Well, you can't use your own product." >> Okay. Yeah. Right. And it did eventually happen where a lawyer saw my stream and they escalated it to like the head of Amazon law or somebody who then punted it over to my division's vice president of HR who called me and was like, "We have to talk about this." And he's a very smart guy. He's still there. Um, when I explained that I had this per written permission, he you could see we were on a Amazon uses a system called Chime, but we're on a video >> and you could see the light go off in his eyes like, "Oh, you've really thought this through, haven't you?" >> He knew that I had like tried to ham him in and he's like, >> "It's fine. I get it. I get where you're going." He figured out very quickly that I was planning on, you know, he's again very smart. He figured out I was planning on leaving to do what I do today. Okay. And he's like, "So, you're on an exit path." And I'm not I'm not a shy person. I'm like, "Yeah, I am." And he's like, "All right, well, like, just don't say anything we're both going to regret." I'm like, "I've been doing this a long time. I I'm here to protect Amazon. I got this." >> Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a malicious like, "Oh, now that I have a microphone in front of me, let me let me say all the bad things that I couldn't say to someone at work and like here here they all come." >> Yeah. And even today, I'm sometimes critical of some Amazon policies, but you know, Amazon was incredibly great for me and I have nothing but respect for many of the people there. So, um, because sometimes people want me to dish dirt on Amazon, you know, they get there's a couple hot button issues. U, one of the ones that people want me to talk about, which I know nothing about because I always All my products were digital. They were all electronic products. They want to know about worker conditions in the warehouse. And I'm like, >> right, >> I was at a warehouse one time for a three-day training that was required because they wanted all leaders to know about the warehouse. I can't tell you much about worker conditions, >> right? >> But, you know, those are like some of the hot button issues. >> Yeah. And we have like like not for me at the same level, but even at Microsoft obviously it'll be like, oh, like Teams is crashing, so like, "Hey, Nick, like tell us why that's happening." or like, "Oh, my email's not working. Like, tell us why Microsoft sucks at email." And it's like, "Okay, like, come on, let me let me go get on the phone and talk to the email guys and they'll uh they'll go sort it for you." Like, it's I don't think people realize just the enormous scale of all these things. It's almost like different planets of of things happening. So, >> yeah, you know, when I was It's a great point. people here. I was an Amazon vice president which is a big role and I had 800 people also a big role but at that time there were 300 VPs now uh I have some friends uh who are still in leadership there there's over 500 because the company's that big uh if every VP has a thousand people working for them well we have more than 500,000 employees like you know it's it's a huge it's an enormous company that's almost I I think two million. >> Wow. Yeah, that's incredible. >> Now, a lot of those people are working in warehouses, but even if you come down to the the people working in jobs like yours and mine, um there's well over 100,000 actually, I think approximately a quarter million sort of white collar jobs, not related directly to the warehouse. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, that's and and thanks for sharing all the experience. I think it's really cool to see how the the progression happens. Uh I thought it was a really sort of awesome experience and opportunity you had and uh how you kind of mentioned like it was like the easiest ride to VP, but what I loved hearing was that someone had said like look, Ethan's doing this and like like what other proof do you need? you might as well kind of like let it happen and and then you can kind of demonstrate that which I feel like is a pretty rare thing to happen but I think and I guess we're going to start getting into like from the perspective of executives and you know high level leadership what we look for in managers but that's one of those things I think that's probably a great kickoff point that's look someone's literally demonstrating that they're operating at some higher level they're taking initiative accountability they're building up all of this trust like if you were doing all of that stuff and totally fumbling all of it. They would be like, "We should probably get this guy out because it's not working." But that's not what was happening. So, yeah, kind of maybe pass it back over to you and kind of hear some of your thoughts around that. >> Yeah. So, to the specific challenge I was given that gave me a platform. Um, we sold our first Kindle. We rushed it out for the first holiday. And the actual target, the first Kindle tablet was targeted not to be a general purpose tablet, but to be a competitor to something called the Nook, which was Barnes & Noble's um color e-reader. We had black and white. >> I remember this. Yeah. >> They had we had black and white e-readers uh you know uh the the original Kindle that was for reading books only and they had a color one and we wanted to compete with it. So, we rolled out a tablet and my team and others were saying, "Hey, you know, this thing's actually a tablet. It's a different category. It should be thought of differently, but it had come from the books team, from the Kindle team, and they're like, "No, no, it's an e-reader." So, it was really funny because when you went to like the opening menu, it pushed you towards books and magazines and like the app store was buried. And of course, the users all wanted apps and games and and so we had to like have this discussion of like that the user evidence shows that you think you're selling a book reader and you're not. Change your mind. And it was very hard for that team to change their mind. But when Bezos saw it, he's like, "Oh, we have to go global quick. We're going to seize this market." And his vision, which wasn't realized, was we can be the iPad of the Android market. If we can build enough of a brand quickly enough, we can make the world a two tablet world where there's only iPads and Kindles. Now obviously the rest of the Android ecosystem had something to say about that and we never achieved that goal but that was what he was thinking about and there was a huge time pressure and where that led is I was given a a bit of a blank check on resources in order to go global quickly which led to the team ballooning which gave me the the VP scope job of running that and my team and I together we're able to deliver, >> right? >> And so if you summarize my VP case, it's big scope actually delivering, >> right? >> And that that was the summary. So, um, and I think since you're interested in what do we look for in leaders, that's kind of a quick version of it, which is are they handling a problem of the complexity we would look for at this level, whatever it is, senior manager, senior principal, um, director, vice president, you know, at Microsoft, you of EVPs and CVPs and lots of variations in that. Um, but are we handle are they handling a problem at that level and then uh are they doing it well? Is it getting done? >> And I was lucky enough tying all the way back to what I said about having focused on team building from early and running HR. I had a great team that was able to deliver because in the end, you know, someone running 800 people, you are more or less a bureaucrat. The the people are doing the work. I had built a team though in various ways that could do the work and did do the work, >> right? >> Um and we shipped a bunch of stuff and we were uh something people like to hear. It's worth sharing. I made VP, but several of then my senior managers made director. Awesome. >> And several of my, you know, uh, lots of people became senior managers with the growth. >> I I have lots of faults as a leader. Getting my people promoted was a strength. Um, and you know, now fast forward quite a few years, most of those people who became directors or senior managers are now VPs or EVPs all over the world because they've moved around, but they've they've continued to grow in their leadership. >> Awesome. Yeah, >> that's a Yeah, I think uh I don't know if uh for especially more junior people might not even kind of realize this yet, but I think the more senior you become, the more you start to realize like I want to be with a manager where like if they're growing and I'm along for the ride, like I want to be growing as well. I think sometimes more junior engineers, they don't really have experience yet with a manager. It's almost like they don't know what to look for. But >> I think the longer you're around it, the more you start to realize like, hey, wait, like I don't feel like I'm being supported in my role, cuz you might not even know what that looks like yet. But over time, you start to go, wait a second, like why is my manager not talking to me about growth in my role? Um, why is it even when I do proactively bring it up, they're almost like, yeah, like it'll happen or like it's kind of pushed off. Like you kind of want to be around someone who is who is kind of helping drive you for growth and supporting you when you're taking those chances. Yeah, there's a there's a good um we talked earlier how you're not trained to be a manager, >> right? >> There's a there's another piece of that which is when we're educated in college, people don't train us how to work in a corporate environment either, >> right? >> So, they don't train us what does a good manager look like? How do you have a good relationship with a manager? I I actually have spent a lot of time in my courses and posts telling people like, look, here's how you work well with a manager. Here's what they're thinking. By the way, see, we're always wondering, what is our manager thinking about us? Lots of people wonder that. You probably do. I certainly did. Um, what's my manager thinking? And the interesting thing is your manager is thinking about what their manager is thinking of them. I just like they're not thinking most of their interest is on how am I perceived. Oh, right. And I'm I'm perceived. Well, you know, when it comes to Nick, I'm looking down at you at this point. If you work for me, I need Yes, I want to take care of Nick. I need Nick to be doing these things. Why do I need him to be doing them? Well, it's good for him, but it's also good for me, >> right? >> And like I'm thinking about you in the context of how you deliver for me and what I'm trying to accomplish. So, if you play into that, I'm I literally made deals with a number of people on my team where I said, "Look, I need you to do this thing. you you do whatever this thing is I need and I will do my best to make sure you're recognized for it. And it was a it was a handshake deal of you deliver for me and that will give me the platform to get you promoted, right? >> And I did that over and over. Now, many managers aren't willing to go out on that limb because what if it doesn't work out? >> They don't have total control of their promotion. Also, you can have the awkward discussion where I make a deal with you. And then I have to go back to you and say, "Yeah, so I know you tried, but actually you're not good enough yet." Oh, yes, I am. I gave my life to you. I worked all these hours. Yes, you did work a lot of hours. They were just ineffective. And that can be very awkward. >> Yep. Yeah. And I've had situations like for me, I I lean into the uh I' I've said this publicly, like I don't I don't like to and I've told my employees this. I don't promise like do this project, you get promoted. Um, but your framing I think is is key here where uh it's really like the things that uh I'm tasking people with these are things that that help them in their growth, they're going to help me. But I think what I try to do as good of a job as I can is I try to explain to people like the business side of that. So it's not just my manager one day said, "Hey Nick, on a whim, you better go deliver this project. that's going to be your uh path to growth and then I just kind of pass that down and we kind of share responsibilities. It's like no like the business has this uh this area that we need uh whether it's growth we need to security whatever it happens to be like this is a business goal Nick you're tasked with it and then I go okay and I have to work with my team but I explain to them it's not like it's not just for your career and it's not just for me but like it's literally this is the business uh case for and I try as best I can to make sure that they see that. So I find there's a little bit more engagement because it's not just hey make this number go down or make this number go up and >> yeah like I know how to make the code do that okay it's a difficult problem I'll solve it because engineers love hard problems to solve but they also get the oh like this is why we're doing it. >> Yeah. So, I love that you're talking about that, the business impact, uh, because many many engineers begin thinking, "Oh, business, that's the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert." Like, I don't need to worry about any of that. >> And it's true for your daily skills. You don't necessarily need business skill or or financial understanding, but >> that is what pays for the work we do. And beautiful architecture that never makes money quickly gets scrapped. And so if you want to be a builder, you still have to have an awareness of like what is the economic outcome of this building I'm doing. The other thing I really like about what you said is you're um leading in public. And so I tell people when I was still streaming on Twitch, I used to say, "Look, my team watches these streams. Believe me, if anybody watches them, it's my team. And if I'm spewing they're going to call me on it tomorrow." And so I have >> I hope that my team does. >> Yeah. Well, you know, like definitely I I once was able to recruit a very senior leader. He asked me um he basically asked me, "How do I know what kind of leader you are?" And I'm like, "Well, there's a hundred hours of video of me talking about my leadership on Twitch, and if I were a hypocrite, my team would burn me down." And he said, "Well, that's the most interesting answer I've ever gotten to that question." Um, and it was very convincing to him. So I applaud what you're doing because uh people can know what kind of leader you are and get to know your style and there is a big element of style in what makes manager employee fit. There's a set of behaviors. You as an employee need to do certain things. A manager needs to do certain things. But there also is a big element of style. Some managers uh are very consensus based. for example, some managers are comparatively very decisive on their own. Those kinds of things can make a difference because uh what sort of person do I want to work for? What's going to be a comfortable fit? Um, you know, I had I worked for people in my career, some of whom I fit beautifully and some of whom I can see why they were considered good leaders, but they were not good leaders for me. >> Right. Yes. >> And and that's okay. And so to your point about what makes people early in their career, you need to figure out not what leader is just soft on you, but what leader fits what you need. >> Yep. Absolutely. Yep. And this is uh so for me like a lot of my coaching even at Microsoft is a lot of more early in career folks and they'll when they're talking to me about challenges with their manager, how do I talk to my manager? How do we talk about career growth? I always have to like preface everything. It's like look like I can tell you what I would like or how I would be approached and then I have to remind them look I'm not your manager and by the way because of that here are some other ways that you might want to try and feel this out and if you can feel this out and understand it then you might have a better understanding of which direction but I think your point like style right like you need to kind of figure these things out and that's going to take a bit of especially in the beginning a little bit of trial and error to try and understand how some these things work. >> Yeah. And another thing sometimes the grumpy old man in me wishes I do sort of wish everyone would have a terrible manager at some point or work for a really bad company only because sometimes people who haven't worked somewhere that truly sucks are complaining about what did suck at Amazon or what I'm sure is not great at Microsoft. Yeah, I have a lot of friends who work at Microsoft and they will talk to me for example about, you know, the heavy bureaucracy burden of being such a large old company and that's true. But if you've not worked somewhere that had actively nasty management or that was running out of money and couldn't, you know, pay the electric bill, you don't have any balance in your yes, I am working in a big slow bureaucracy, but I never ever ever will need to worry that my paycheck will bounce. And so >> these are tradeoffs and and >> it is it is >> um >> at Amazon once we had a program we still have it I think it came in kind of as I was leaving where we to get more developers because we were short on developers. We were retraining people from other careers. >> Okay. >> So you're successful in whatever but you've never been a programmer will put you through a boot camp and make you you know an entry level SDE but at 40. >> Sure. And what people told me about those employees is they had often worked at quite challenging, unattractive jobs and they brought so much maturity to the team because they're like, "Yes, our work is hard. Yes, the deadlines are demanding. You have no idea how nice it is here." You know, compared to maybe like working the floor at a department store. >> Sure. or you know maybe I was a manager in fast food or I was a truck driver or like you don't really >> yeah diff different perspective right and if you don't have it then it's really it's difficult to to draw comparisons you kind of have your own your own lens on these things so go ahead go ahead >> no I was just going to say having a horrible manager is well it is a good formative experience it also for anyone listening I will tell you it will happen to you you'll get reorged or whatever, you will have the chance to experience true pain. I'm sorry for you, but also not sorry because it will it will make you more flexible and appreciative when you are lucky enough to have a better manager. >> Yeah. >> Value that more. >> As funny as it sounds, right? Like I think again if it hasn't happened to you yet, like having awareness that like this will happen, like what are things that you want to pay attention to, right? Like think about the manager you have now, how the interactions go, how they're supporting you. when you switch and have a new manager like but some things might be very obvious to you right away and you're maybe you're being micromanaged and you're like hey this sucks like and I feel it all the time but you might have other things that happen over a period of time and you start to realize like hey my manager is kind of crappy and maybe it's like they're just not supporting you maybe they're too hands off and you feel very disconnected but like having a crappy manager is a thing that will happen and um yeah I think having awareness back to the style point about, you know, what you're looking for. Maybe your manager is actually okay, not like a bad person or something. They're just not okay for you. >> And that could be a really bad thing, like a bad experience in your career. >> Yeah. I I don't know. Uh I had a manager at one point >> who many people thought was amazing. He was not as interested in disruptive innovation. He didn't like to rock the boat. He liked to row the boat the way he felt the leadership wanted him to row. Whereas I'm always a little bit like, ah, okay, that's good, but over here is better or could be better. >> Uh, that was a big tension for me. And it's not that he was wrong. Uh, he was highly valued because the people who would put him in roles, the leadership above him was like, hey, we need to get this team to this island and this guy will row in that direction single-mindedly. And that was the problem for me. I'm like, well, but there are other islands. Do we know that's the right island? And he's like, we are rowing row, you know, and uh it's just style. Um in that case, uh so sometimes you do have managers who are actively manipulative or or whatever. Uh but you're right, learning to know what you want from a manager and just knowing what you should what you quote unquote should get. I've tried at different points in the past to write kind of an employees bill of rights, you know, like what should you expect from a manager and what shouldn't you expect >> um because there are sometimes things you shouldn't expect you you >> Yeah, >> that's totally fair. Yeah. Um and we got a few minutes left because I I know we have a a hard stop. So maybe in the last couple of minutes here before we sign off, we talked a bit about management. talked about even some, you know, some junior perspective and we touched on for like for seniors and stuff like kind of had like a pretty quick summary that I think is is kind of spot on, right? Like being able to have uh impact but also like not the scope of the impact but actually carrying out the work and delivering on it. So for folks that are more senior or they're, you know, they're going from maybe a senior level engineering role to principal or or comparable bands, I realize staff and other titles are used. So heading in that direction, uh, what advice would you give to people that kind of feel like maybe they've been at that level for a bit and they're like, I feel kind of stuck and like what would kind of help them start to move forward and I know that's a could be answered many different ways, but just curious on your perspective. >> Yeah, so I've thought a lot about what makes a good principal engineer from my perspective as say a vice president or a director. So the principal engineer role the table stakes are that you're a really great engineer that you're good at of course at coding you're good at design and architecture because I'm going to be delegating. Remember I don't code anymore so I'm going to be delegating deciding our architecture to you. That's one piece is I need to be feel confident that you're going to be able to do that job. The second thing is I need you to be able to explain to me because you put two engineers in a room, you have an argument already. You put three, you have a three-way argument. Like we, you know, it's cats in a bag a little bit because we're all very passionate about what is the right design, what is the optimal way. We're taught to optimize, right? >> So, there's this big argument between practical and optimal and elegant and and so on. I need someone who can explain to me so that I'm sure you're right and I can explain it to others so I can help defend you. So the second thing is you do have to have enough communication skill to work across the fact that I'm technical but not as deep as you. Right? The next thing that principal engineers are often used is they're used as ambassadors. Meaning we need something from this other team. I can go to the leader of that other team and say, "We need an API that does this or we need a, you know, we need a component that does that or service." But often the way we line that up is I send my principal engineer to talk to their principal engineer and they figure out how they would do that. They don't necessarily have to agree that they're going to do it, but like this is how how we would do it and how hard it will be and how big it will be. And then when I go to the other leader, I can say, "Well, our principles have talked and they have a plan for this." And so I need you to be able to get to that plan with another engineer. Now, what you're hearing in all of this is that what a leader needs from a principal engineer beyond technical expertise is some non-personnel leadership and influence. That is the job of a principal engineer is not just to be a technically sharp knife. Most of the time um there are situations where you can be a principal engineer only working on code or architecture very narrowly but those teams have to have wickedly hard problems. See, I built led the building of Prime Video, the Amazon App Store, and the commerce part of Twitch were like the three kind of big things I did across my career. Those are all business applications. They do not have really nasty algorithmic problems. Sure, >> both Amazon and Microsoft have those. I don't know the equivalent Azure services, but like Amazon has S3, the simple storage service. At this point, it stores at least hundreds of trillions of objects, if not whatever comes after that. Quintillion, I think. Um, uh, >> quadrillion. Yeah. Yeah. >> Quadrillion. Quadrillion. um the question of how do you keep track of a quadrillion objects spread through many many data centers efficiently that you can be just a principle working on that you won't have to like be all these other sort of social skills. So there are two types of principles, but if you want to be the pure geek type, the the pure technical, you'd better get yourself onto a project that has such a hard problem that solving or optimizing that problem is success. You don't need to do anything else. If you're on a Microsoft team like Office or Teams or whatever, those are consumer applications and the PowerPoint principal engineer is there to help get PowerPoint to ship and work, not to solve some there are no deep Oh, I'll I'll I'll insult somebody, but there really are no like mindbreaking technical algorithmic problems about powerful. there if there are they're going to be a smaller subset, right? It's like it's the the bulk of it is not >> you're not going onto that team likely to say this is the team because problems like this it's >> so the last thing I need principal engineers to do to give that roadmap um is I need principal engineers to also then mentor and grow the team. They have to have some ability to bring others up behind them because if you want to move on to senior PE or to another team, you've got to help develop the talent. And so of course some senior engineers get irritated about ohh another newbie. you you can feel a little of that irritation of maybe, but you've got to have a way to be like, I'm going to explain for the 17th time to someone why why it's not as simple because engineers love to say, isn't it just like that that problem that I described storing all those objects? Well, isn't it just really a big disc drive? >> No, actually it's not. Yes, there's an analogy there. It is just a big story. Isn't it just a big database? Well, >> yes and no. It's the world's largest database. Like that is its own thing. >> So, no, those are those are all great. And uh just to to quickly summarize that part from my perspective, I think one of the really awesome things you mentioned was that yes, there could be some opportunities to be hyper technical and stay there, but literally everything else you described was yep, you got the technical stuff and hopefully all of your other people skills, your negotiation, your ability to mentor, literally all of these other things come into play because early on, I find a lot of people say, "Screw it. I'm just going to be as technical as I can." I find that that gets you so far in your career before you start to feel like you're hitting a wall and it's because you need to be leaning into some of these other things for the most part. >> Awesome. >> All right, Nick. Well, as we discussed, I have to go. >> Yes. >> But it has been a true pleasure. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for the chance to get to know you and talk about some of this. >> Yeah, this was great. I'll uh I'll get some links from you after and I'll make sure I post them all. And uh yeah, thanks again for for joining me. All right, have a great day. >> Take care.