One year ago tomorrow, Friday:
Well, after 20.63 years at Sun, I have been caught up in today’s RIF (Reduction In Force). As of 5pm today, I’m out of here.
One year later, I’m living in a new apartment, in a different city, working for a different company, on a different and fascinating collection of problems. And I’m having a blast.
Not surprisingly, one of the dominant qualities of Amazon is the sheer scale of the operation. Normally I encounter this in a relatively abstract way – transactions, servers, gigabytes, bandwidth. Numbers. Numbers on a screen, on a piece of paper. But later this month I’ll get a chance to experience scale, when I visit the Fernley fulfillment center (automated warehouse) in Nevada. Here’s a piece from Business Week about the place.