[awsthro00945]

I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank".

I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience).

Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.

[rhoulihan]

Actually, I was a direct report to Colin Lazier (https://twitter.com/clazier) who is the GM for DynamoDB, Keyspaces, and Glue Elastic Views. I was the original TPM for DocumentDB before joining the Professional Services team as a Senior Practice Manager to head up the NoSQL Blackbelt team which led the archtecture/design effort for Amazon's RDBMS->NoSQL migration. I was brought back to the service team by Jim Scharf to lead the technical solutions team for strategic accounts, but I maintained the org chart role of Senior Practice Manager until I left for MongoDB.

Compensation was a minor issue. I was an org chart aberration already and AWS pulled out all the stops to retain me. I will always appreciate the opportunity that AWS provided me and my time at DynamoDB will always hold a special place in my heart. I really do believe that MongoDB is poised to do great things and my decision had more to do with being a part of that than anything else.

[gigatexal]

Whoa straight from the source!

[belter]

You never heard of Rick Houlihan? He is the 90% of DynamoDB Evangelism... At the same time you are able to this internal lookups? Do you work with DynamoDB?

AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k

AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M

AWS re:Invent 2021 - DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0

Amazon DynamoDB | Office Hours with Rick Houlihan: Breaking down the design process for NoSQL applications https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806

[amzn-throw]

Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company?

This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him?

Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner.

But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many deep internal engineering challenges to solve.

[gigatexal]

Maybe that was the problem. He cited that there was seemingly not enough effort in making DynamoDB better as evidenced by the many orthogonally very close other DBs that AWS promotes. If Rick was ears to the ground listening to customers and sending back feedback but it was falling on deaf ears that's enough ground for someone as high up and as influential and productive as him to leave. It also speaks to inner AWS turmoil at least at DynamoDB.

[amzn-throw]

Based on what I know, that's not the case.

DDB is a steady ship. The explanation on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30009611 is likely the best explanation. L7 TPMs make the same money as L6 SDEs.

Getting promoted to L8 - director - is a monumental effort and likely seemed much harder than pursuing a comprable position at MongoDB.

Good for him for doing it, and for making Amazon take a long hard look at every way they failed in not keeping him.

[awsthro00945]

>It also speaks to inner AWS turmoil at least at DynamoDB.

How? Rick wasn't part of the DynamoDB service team. He wasn't an engineer, nor a manager on the team, nor even a product manager. He was a salesperson that specialized in DDB. He most likely had very little interactions, if any, with the engineering team. I don't see how him leaving speaks at all to anything about the inner workings of the engineering teams.

Rick seems cool, and after skimming some of his chats he seems really knowledgeable about the customer-facing side of DDB, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to him. But I think you're making way too many assumptions about his "rank" and "influence" within the company.

[garethmcc]

I have watched almost all those talks as they are technically dense and full of very good and very useful technical knowledge that I would be much poorer for not watching. These are not sales videos but highly complex instructional content meant for developers on the ground

[belter]

Are you calling the person who did the core DynamoDB Technical Deep Dive sessions at reInvent, for the last 4 years in a row, a sales person?

[awsthro00945]

There are over a thousand breakout sessions at every reinvent every year. Some of the speakers are sales people, some are engineers, some are managers. There are L5 or junior engineers who give reinvent session talks. It's a fun gig, but it doesn't mean that the speaker is some top executive or anything like that.

Rich was in the sales org. His primary job was sales. Reinvent is a sales conference. Speaking at reinvent is a sales pitch. He was a salesperson. I'm not sure why you're so offended by that. Being a salesperson isn't bad, it's just an explanation for why engineers wouldn't have heard of him.

[amzn-throw]

What do you think Solutions Architects and Developer Advocates (between the two groups who do most Re:invent sessions) are?

Hell, what do you think re:Invent is? It's a sales conference.

In any company you have two groups of people: Those that build the product, and those that sell it. Ultimately, solutions architects and developer advocates are there to help sell the product.

Of course Amazon is customer obsessed. And genuinely interested in ensuring customers have a good experience, and their technical needs are met - through education, support, and architectural guidance. But ultimately, that's what it is.

[belter]

I think I understand now why he left...

[awsthro00945]

No, I haven't. There are thousands of reinvent sessions every year. I don't watch them all (I don't watch hardly any of them, and most people I know in Amazon watch a couple breakout sessions if that. Some don't even watch the keynotes). Their targeted audience is AWS customers, not internal engineers. Reinvent itself is a sales conference. If internal Amazonians want to learn about something like DDB, there are internal talks and documents given by the engineering leaders that we watch.

>At the same time you are able to this internal lookups?

I looked him up on LinkedIn. Nothing internal about it.

[gigatexal]

was not me at r/aws

unless he posts here about it we can't really know -- we can only speculate but I think he had a higher amount of influence than his title/rank might suggest. I think Rick's influence with respect to DynamoDB is akin to that of Kelsey Hightower's influence over k8s at Google.