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A Good Day With Jeff
Author’s note
Business Insider liked this post and asked me to do an article about it. They interviewed me, bait-and-switched it, and made it about Amazon being a terrible working environment, resulting in a pretty awful article that I basically had to disavow. Although Liz Nichols really did work out of a broom closet for many months; I was chatting with her about it again 25 years later. She said it was tough whenever she had to take a call and close the door.
AI Notes
A memoir piece published on Medium in May 2023, recalling an Amazon offsite from roughly nineteen years earlier. One afternoon at Jeff Bezos's boathouse on Lake Washington, told in close detail. Steve had just dropped a hundred pounds and was being included in executive-level technical conversations for the first time. The offsite's nominal purpose was to think about using machine learning for systems operations. What the offsite came down to, in Steve's telling, was three things: (1) suggesting Mechanical Turk and being silently ignored, (2) accidentally making CIO Rick Dalzell laugh by whispering "why did he look at us when he said whales" during a prepared speech, and (3) standing alone at the south end of the Great Room during lunch, admiring the wall stereo, until Bezos came over and lit up because finally someone had noticed — walking Steve through every feature, including the speaker wires routed through the room's ornamental ceiling chains.
Related listings
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2011
Amazon War Story #1: Jeff Bezos
The companion boathouse-era piece — same Bezos, same Amazon, different room. Read together as a two-shot.
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2020
Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had
Bookend — the Amazon years from the inside, looking back two decades on.
Where it was argued
- Hacker News May 2023