When I joined Amazon, I was really facinated and surprised with the away team model of working. For those who don't know about away team model, if you have a dependency on some other teams code base. You read their code yourself and do the changes instead of requesting the other team to do it. Not sure if it's a common practice in big tech companies ? If it is, do you support it ? #microsoft #adobe #salesforce #google #flipkart #apple #oracle #amazon #culture #workplace #officelife
What kind of poll is this? I want to select both options
I definitely work in code bases of products that my team consumes and needs that isn't owned by us. The other teams support this and I'm always working with them on their product anyway.
Away team model at amazon is used only when there is a top priority item and don’t have funding to get it done. It’s done to optimize on the engineering resources. Think of it - team x needs an engineer but would have to hire , where as team y has one with cycles. It might be easier to repurpose for a specific project. The execution is the key. I have seen it executed well and executed poorly at Amazon. I will admit that this is generally used as something of last resort and not the first thing. In the good execution I have seen padding enough time for the away engineer to ramp up. Also having another engineer do all the code reviews. Some engineers love it - getting to learn new things and some engineers don’t.
It’s a way for Amazon to do matrix management without doing matrix management. Your on team X. Your manager is the SDM of team x. He hires, fires, promotes you. Your working on team Y to add feature for team X. They’re your technical home for that period. It can work okay, or it can be a nightmare. Team Y has ZERO incentive in most cases to give you any attention. Your average CR revisions is going to go up (it just is…trust me)
But matrix management is such a consulting-firm clusterfuck that I’m glad this is as close as we get.
> I would rather kill myself. Well that escalated quickly
The frustration of getting alignment with other teams + twice as many Code Review approvals + reading through a lot of shitty code to just add an if condition + across time zone meetings + setting up new code base every 2-3 weeks. That is already a slow death TBH!.
Good, good. Let the hate flow through you.