Hasnain says:

Come for the exciting distributed systems knowledge (some seriously good stuff here), stay for the super insightful career growth advice.

“And this is probably one area of my role at Amazon that I’ve thought about and tried to develop and be more intentional about than anything else I do. As a really senior engineer in the company, of course I have strong opinions and I absolutely have a technical agenda. But If I interact with engineers by just trying to dispense ideas, it’s really hard for any of us to be successful. It’s a lot harder to get invested in an idea that you don’t own. So, when I work with teams, I’ve kind of taken the strategy that my best ideas are the ones that other people have instead of me. I consciously spend a lot more time trying to develop problems, and to do a really good job of articulating them, rather than trying to pitch solutions. There are often multiple ways to solve a problem, and picking the right one is letting someone own the solution. And I spend a lot of time being enthusiastic about how those solutions are developing (which is pretty easy) and encouraging folks to figure out how to have urgency and go faster (which is often a little more complex). But it has, very sincerely, been one of the most rewarding parts of my role at Amazon to approach scaling myself as an engineer being measured by making other engineers and teams successful, helping them own problems, and celebrating the wins that they achieve.”

Posted on 2023-08-01T06:47:43+0000