New Hire Data Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

I’ve been in industry about 24 years, and have some low-level experience before that.I work with new hires that have considerably less experience. I’m old enough to be their father, in some cases. I’ve also worked with some new hires that are older than me, but not up to speed on the same hardware as me.Honestly? Show some enthusiasm for solving the problem at hand. Do your homework, studying data sheets and so on. Ask questions when you get stuck, so you can go back and do your homework.And, for our sake, listen to our war stories on occasion. ;-)If your mentor is being a proper mentor, they’ll give you space to learn, and give you support when you need it. They’ll give you guidance when it’s necessary or appropriate. They really want you to succeed, but they also want you to become self sufficient eventually.If it’s clear you don’t know some particular low level details, but are eager to learn and apply the knowledge, a good mentor will point you in the right direction and offer hints and guidance.At least, that’s what I try to do.

What I learned very quickly at Amazon is that output matters more than input. Amazon refers to ‘output’ as the results you achieve, while ‘input’ means how hard you work to achieve these results. To put it bluntly, nobody at Amazon cares about your input. Nobody cares about how hard you work, or how late you stay, or how many emails you send per hour. Success, as an Amazonian, is defined, 100%, by results and output.Input is Merely Table-StakesNow, you might ask, “Doesn’t the above statement contradict with one of Jeff Bezos’s better-publicized descriptions of Amazon’s culture?” In 1997, he famously claimed that: “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon, you can’t choose two out of three.” It’s not my intent to double-guess Bezos (he is a far better professionalist than I ever will be,) but my five years at Amazon have taught me that input is merely table-stakes.Amazon views input as a means to an end; an end, which is invariably defined by your output. This insistence on output has helped make Amazon a remarkably apolitical company for its size. It doesn’t matter if you leave your desk after your boss does. There is no “boys’ club” to join, either. It doesn’t matter if you schedule your Outlook client to send emails at late nights or on weekends. What matters is output. The better your output (by the end of the year), the more stock you would receive. It’s that simple.Output must happen both in the Short-run and the Long-runAnother core distinction in Amazon’s views is that output must happen both in the short-run and the long-run. Short-term output means achieving quick wins. It means making your presence immediately felt, with a string of iterative improvements that add instant value. As a New Hire Orientation Host, I would tell new Amazonians, on their first day, that they are already late. They are likely behind on some deadline that their team had prepared, even before the new hire had joined the company. In other words, achieving quick output, and testing it, and building on it, is an indelible part of the Amazon cultural fabric.On the other hand, long-term output is just as important. Amazon loves clean-sheet innovation (even if about 90% of Amazon’s inventions tend to be quick and iterative.) Clean-sheet innovation is the type where you Think Big and innovate on behalf of customers, over the long run. Jeff Bezos distills this point in the following statement, “Amazon is willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. Amazon is stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”Amazon constantly pushes you for long-term results without punishing you for failing. Failing while shooting for the moon is quite acceptable actually, as long as you can demonstrate how you have evolved your initial hypothesis and applied these learnings to pursue new discoveries.Output Often Happens Without a Roadmap or a Safety netAn additional dimension is that over time you become more comfortable at delivering output without a roadmap or safety net. Unlike your colleagues at other top tech companies, you don’t lean on proxies or second-hand knowledge. What I’m referring to, are things like consultants, or a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, or a LexisNexis account, etc.Throughout that process, you lean heavily on internal data and customer anecdotes. You also invent other frugal and unusual methods to get data. As a result, you become the ultimate subject-matter expert who doesn’t passively wait for your superiors to make a decision. You submit a firm recommendation, asking leadership for the resources required to make the recommendation happen. You also answer leadership’s questions to get them on board or, conversely, to help them decide against your recommendation. In the end, what gives you license to display such extreme Ownership is knowing your first-hand behavioral data cold, and knowing your customer anecdotes.In other words, the smartest voice in the room doesn’t belong to the most senior VP. The smartest is she who knows the data the best and has delivered the most output.——You can read more about Amazon’s culture here.

When I was in college in the late 1970s, nobody knew what a computer scientist or a software engineer was. “Something about computers, right?” Now there are movies about hackers. “Have you ever cracked triple-DES in under 60 seconds?”In the years since I graduated from college, new fundamental algorithms and data structures have been invented. Fundamental problems that I thought were optimally solved have new, faster solutions. I’m talking about searching and sorting, not something esoteric.When I was a new hire, every software project started with a blank slate. Today, every project is a feature added onto a 10-year-old code base. The optimal approach to a problem is different when you’re starting from scratch than when you have to fit into existing code. My finely honed skills are less employable than they once were.My graduating class was 35% women. My first development team was 1/3 women. Now they are gone. Damn brogrammers chased ’em away. I kinda miss women.At my first job in the 1980s, software engineers were a valued (even honored) part of a larger engineering team consisting of electrical and mechanical engineers. If I was working today, I’d be a frikkin’ galley slave, rowing my ass off for the privilege of staying employed.Every good developer once had a library of books. Remember books—those bundles of paper glued together on one side? Today most beginning and intermediate problems can be solved by asking a question that starts off, “Hey, google…” Every problem has been solved before, but today we can see the solution. You can tell you’re asking a really advanced question when google doesn’t give you any relevant search results. But books were like that too.I used to stare down the muzzle of a particle accelerator that smashed electrons into a sheet of phosphors located a few inches in front of my eyes. Jeez I love flat-screens. My first portable computer weighed 18 pounds. My current one weighs 18 ounces.