My first year at Amazon

As I am approaching the end of my first year at Amazon as a data scientist, I think back to the expectations I had prior to joining. Along with my thoughts I want to share my experience thus far. What I share here is based on my personal experience, a different organization or team probably operates differently.

Work Life Balance is not as bad as I thought

Prior to joining Amazon, one of the things I was expecting is the constant long hours and high stress environment. This wasn’t really the case. Sure there are times with meeting aggressive timelines, and often juggling with multiple projects. But for the most part work life balance is decent.

Speed over craftsmanship

Projects in Amazon move really fast. In the last 12 months my priority has always been to quickly build a working solution and put it into a production system. This isn’t necessary a bad thing, it allows for quick development and implementation. But since priorities can change fairly quick, there is often not enough time to revisit a working model for enhancements.

Finding the right data source isn’t trivial

Knowing which data source to use and understanding the nuances in the data tables is a constant challenge. This has by far been the most time consuming and frustrating component in all my projects. The key here is to work closely with the data engineering team.

Document to drive a meeting

In my previous roles, it was very common a slide deck is used to run a meeting. In Amazon a word document is used. Instead of a presenter talking through the slides, there would a time at the start of a meeting for reading and questions would follow. This took a while to get used to. It has pros and cons, I think this allows meeting to run more effectively. Sometimes questions I have would get answered later in the doc. Doc can often be converted into a wiki page and ideas can be easily shared without a presenter. But writing a good doc is very time consuming.

I hope this gives more insights into what to expect for those that are considering joining Amazon. If you like what you see, I can share more insights from what it’s like to be a data scientist at Amazon in future articles.