Paved Paradise

One of the things I tried to do when I was a manager at AWS was connect members of my team to the broader internal community. Generally I found that, when asked, most folks were willing to jump on a call and share their wisdom and perspective from a different portion of the company.

In a particularly memorable such conversation, I’d invited Becky Weiss to present at one of my team meetings. I won’t forget something she shared that day: her love for a particular AWS service, what it enabled for experimentation and learning, and how unique an opportunity it was to have it available to us, because it was internal only (a fact Corey Quinn has bemoaned).

I took it for granted at the time, which was a mistake. Sure could benefit from it now.