The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started poking around and was next to leave I joined Amazonin 1998 as a technical program manager.
I worked my way up and eventually found myself working on a secret project forJeff Bezoshimself.
Despite the fact that I disagreed with the company’s practices, Bezos himself was difficult to dislike.
It’s hard not to like a person who’s that smart.
Bezos was on a mad mission to get big fast.
As soon as I got there, I started interviewing other candidates.
The Amazon office was unlike the conventional startup atmosphere I was used to.
The building was grungy and the offices were dark and dingy.
Despite that, once you stepped into the building, there was a crackle in the air.
You could feel that something really big was going on and it was all centered on Jeff.
After interviewing, I wound up in the technical program management organization.
My job for the first year was to help coordinate projects that spanned across multiple teams.
We had all the best stories.
I then became an engineering manager in developer tools.
Toward the end of my time at Amazon, Jeff asked me to work on a secret project.
He was always dreaming up stuff and assigning tasks that seemed impossible.
The project was meant to be something likeReddit.
I didn’t know enough about distributed computing to pull off what Jeff wanted in his desired timeframe.
Meanwhile,Googleoffered me a great package, so I left Amazon in 2005 to work there.
He’d reset us and change how everyone in the company thought about things.
He had this electric presence, a magnetism to him that was unmistakable.
However, I foundAmazon could be a horrible place to work.
Some employees would berate others.
It didn’t matter if the toilet was dirty or if engineers were being paged all night long.
He seemed to only care if it started slowing him down.
Maybe that’s the kind of leader you have to be.
Successful leaders don’t take no for an answer.
People were very cautious with their words around him.
When people raised concerns to him, he’d sometimes laugh in their faces.
I felt like Amazon employees could never say if something bad was happening at Amazon.
You could be brave and raise issues, but you were swimming against the stream.
The post blew up and made it into theWall Street Journal.
I heard through the grapevine Jeff was aware of the post and got a laugh out of it.
Jeff was likable, so I was glad to hear he wasn’t angry.
He consistently came across as calm and keenly interested in everything everyone has to say.
He wasn’t afraid to ask questions or appear ignorant.
BI reached out to representatives for Jeff Bezos but received no response.
