When the canary stops singing…

This is the story of when I just had to open my big mouth in front of a Senior VP at Amazon, and the journey that impulsive decision put me on. Charlie Bell was an absolutely legendary figure at Amazon for nearly 24 years. You may have heard of him because he recently <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2021/microsoft-amazon-reach-truce-allowing-former-aws-executive-charlie-bell-start-new-role/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">ruffled some feathers</a> with his high profile move to Microsoft. Charlie was an <a href="https://www.podean.com/jeff-bezoss-s-team-the-senior-execs-leading-amazon-through-covid-19" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">S-team member</a>, part of the elite few who had direct access to Jeff Bezos with large influence over company-wide decision making. His list of accomplishments is impressive. But I personally knew him for one thing. The <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Wednesday morning AWS Ops Meetings</a>. Every Wednesday, Charlie led a 2 hour grueling deep dive into every aspect of AWS operations. This was an amazingly open meeting: any of the ten thousand or so AWS engineers was free to join. We routinely had people from every remote engineering outpost in the world dialing in, from Cape Town to Edinburgh to Bangalore. I happened to work in the building where the meeting was hosted in Seattle, so I made it a tradition to attend in person. I wouldn’t miss it, rain or shine. It truly was the Greatest Show on Earth. I was constantly star-struck, as this giant conference room was packed to the brim with some of my favorite Senior Principals and Distinguished Engineers, Directors and VPs at Amazon. Charlie was a high ranking executive with thousands of engineers under him, but he still had an uncanny ability to drop down to incredibly low-level technical details during the meeting and unceremoniously challenge anybody who did-not-know-their-stuff or tried to give an evasive answer. <a href="https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/when-the-canary-stops-singing-37bbdf9d8755">Learn More</a>