Re:What Working at Stripe Has Been Like
by jodrellblank on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:04PM
(#19427444)
It's still surprisingly common for comments from ex-Amazon people to say how shoddy their infrastructure is, and for real-world outages to happen. From the outside, that doesn't seem like the result of an environment "everyone takes responsibility, and fixes the root cause of every problem" working well, does it?
I feel that in the past (present is TBD) Amazon under-indexed on developer experience, tooling, and infrastructure but I think it was caused by lack of investment, not lack of ownership. There's nuance between "Oh no, <shared_resource> broke, not my problem", and "<shared_resource> broke, I want to fix it but can't because <XYZ reason>". In my experience it's usually closer to the latter here.
>Leaders are owners...They never say “that’s not my job".
You own your entire problem space, not just your solution. If something unexpected comes up, you're still ultimately responsible for dealing with it with the goal of solving your actual problem
In a large company it's tempting for people or teams to put up walls around what they think their job description should be. Invariably there are gaps no one wants to own and it turns toxic pretty quickly.