Parting Words for My Ex-Employer

Before I leave, I would like to part by recounting some history you might not know about and pass on some words of advice.

RAI has grown quickly before my eyes and I am immensely proud of the people, past and present, who have contributed to the memories I have had here. Back when RAI had just begun, Jane and Brad had the wild idea of seeding RAI with 20 intern hires. This was unheard of. Most teams get 1 or 2 interns… and we got 20. They proceeded to feed us the metaphorical kool-aid and we happily drank it. We experimented with papers we didn’t understand, spent time messing with 3D pancake printers, boated over to Bill Gates’ house, and quietly huddled in the back of a prime day war room like little penguins. It was incredible.

But, amongst all those crazy experiences, one memory stuck out the most. One day, Darryl Havens (a distinguished engineer) sat us down and started telling us his story. We were awestruck as he told us about how he helped build Microsoft, about how Clippy the paper clip almost became a generalized assistant for all of Windows, and how Bill Gates would rock back and forth in his chair when he got upset. But as he spoke, his eyes began to tear. He looked around at our puzzled faces and explained that he was proud to be sitting in front of people who would shape the future.

Pause... What? Rewind that.

A man who routinely showed up to work at 4 in the morning, a man who influenced the technology of 2 of the largest companies ever created, a man who, when I cheekily asked about which CS classes to take, said that they used to solder their own chips together, thought that some random kids he had never met were going to… shape the future. For some unfathomable reason, he was as inspired by us as we were by him.

And as kids do, we came out of that room wide-eyed, elbowing each other, and whispering “Him? Believing in us? How? We haven’t done anything yet.” I didn’t know how to process his words in that moment, so I decided to reduce it down and simply call it a motivation for us do well in that internship. When our last day arrived and Jeff Wilke came to look at our presentations, I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment. I felt like I had done right by Darryl’s words. Getting to shake hands and discuss the future of robotics with a CEO must’ve meant I did well right?

So, as the internship ended, and I began my full-time career at RAI, just as abruptly as they had fallen upon my ears, Darryl’s words exited my mind. New thoughts took over.

My first thoughts were about how to be the best employee possible. For my first project, I would rent a car from Ellen at the 5th Ave AVIS every day and drive down the I-90 to visit our warehouse to work on our huge robot work cell. During the drive I would think about how to make the system better. I would stay late most nights and routinely make it back just in time before the rental shop closed (or it got too cold in the winter). Then, on weekends, I would code the “non-essential stuff” that would make the system better: GUIs, HMIs, visualizers, refactors. It made me happy when my coworkers or managers would say “Cool, that’s done already?”

But as I moved on, my innocent happiness in my achievements became replaced with thoughts about how little I knew about large scale projects. The future was way too far ahead for me. I wanted to learn how to build the big systems we have now. So, I took on new projects. I first learned about deployments and modularity, then about durability and reinforcement learning, then about data management and scaling. Slowly but surely, I felt myself gaining more expertise.

But, as I gained knowledge, something strange started happening. Instead of feeling more fulfilled, my frustrations began to grow. I started harboring a healthy distaste for tech debt, bureaucratic red tape, and communication breakdowns. Everywhere I turned, the more I wanted to change. My mind started shifting away from immediate improvements to future investments and my thoughts started drifting from the “what is” to the “what ifs”.

Only recently, as I sought closure about my time at RAI, did I stumble across a realization about my nagging thoughts. It was not disappointment I was feeling. It was hunger. I had high standards for RAI’s future and I was frustrated with every deviation off my perceived path towards that vision. It was then when, Darryl’s words came back to me, about how I would shape the future. I suddenly understood that that wasn’t a praise. It was a designation of responsibility. He was passing the torch. It was his way of saying that, well- this crap is hard. By nature, innovation is chaotic, but we are young, and we are powerful, and is our responsibility to put up with it and make change.

My thoughts snapped back to our internship. Back then, we did things differently. We traveled the path less traveled. We were given the gift of newness and uncertainty and it was beautiful. But, we were also just interns, we didn’t have much responsibility, so everything was exciting. Now, after helping build up RAI, I realize that these gifts don’t come for free. Being different invites stiffer opposition, newness results in mistakes, and uncertainty causes disagreements. Exciting progress inevitably slows down. This is simply what shaping the future is like.

So, it seems now, that I have unintentionally gained something besides knowledge during this arduous trek. And, as I bask in an awkward brew of hubris, enlightenment, and?naiveté, I would like to be bold and take this chance to pass on my own torch by sharing a few words with you.

There are times that you will be unhappy during your career. This is natural and inevitable, but also essential. Unhappiness should not be regarded as a destination, but rather be leveraged as motivation. If you want to be a first mover, a harbinger of the future, you cannot afford to be pushed into immobility by frustration. Breaking down walls is part of our job.

I would like to ask you to think for a moment. “Amazon Robotics AI”, that’s a big, bold, statement of a name. What does this mean to you? What do you want this to mean to the world? How are you going to do things daily that you cannot do at any other job in the world? You’re at a trillion dollar company, working in a cutting edge industry at a global scale, and collaborating with some of the brightest minds in the world. I urge you to take pride in that. Shoulder the burden of making changes, being first movers, and telling the rest of the world that your way of robotics is the best way to do it.

As I told people on my team, if I come back to visit in 3 years and anyone tells me that they are doing the same work, just for different projects, I will faint on the spot. As a first mover, mistakes are inevitable, so just experiment. Try different team structures, robots, data storage methods, machine learning techniques, engineering practices, etc. Build things that can be used and re-used. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Prototype the wheel, try out different versions of the wheel, and when you have the final version, use it, sell it, give it to other people. Leverage your inventions, don’t discard them.

And finally, instead of ending my spiel by repeating Jeff’s favorite Amazon cliché about Day 1, I will leave you with this. Complacency is the enemy of innovation. Just because something is, doesn’t mean that it has to be. You are more powerful than you believe. Challenge yourself. Break through. Build the next thing, and the next, and the next.

And on behalf of the rest of the non-Amazonians in the world… surprise us :)