Amazon Day One

Day one at amazon starts with an orientation session.  You know they are growing a lot when they have 5 people per table and 20+ tables at the orientation.  And they do this every week.  Some people were there from other geographies (Dallas, San Francisco), but most were going to work in Seattle.

One of the Amazon core values is frugality.  Your cube has the basics (phone, laptop, keyboard, mouse, nice widescreen display), but not much more.  You can have more if you want it (took no time for me to get a headset for the phone), but you have to ask.  But when you need something, things move fast ... very little bureaucracy. 

All the developers on the team have operational responsibility in addition to their development.  Our team is responsible for figuring out how publishers, authors, etc. get their royalty payments and get information about their payments.  So a developer might "unstick" a payment if it wasn't getting through the system properly.

Everyone is heads down getting ready to open the amazon storefront in a new country, so I anticipate doing some independent learning for a bit.  They have all been quite friendly and I am looking forward to working with my new team.