Yesterday the Amazon CTO shared lessons learned, called it "simplexcity", and we got to chatting: What is the point of old men sharing these highfaluting ideas nobody understands?
Always great to hear lessons and insights from our CTO and my mentor, @Werner. This morning, Werner shared six lessons on “Simplexcity” that he’s learned over the years at @amazon.
— Swami Sivasubramanian (@SwamiSivasubram) December 5, 2024
Loved his insights on distributed systems, timestamps and how we solve in Aurora DSQL. Marc… pic.twitter.com/7fsPcw2EOH
I love this because it confirms everything I've been trying to distill in my new book (43,000 words and counting). But a friend of mine said it's pointless because it reads like influencer drivel that nobody could ever apply in the real world. Or even understand without having learned the same lessons themselves.
What's the point of soundbite advice that takes 20 years to grok?
The problem with a lot of this stuff is that it's tacit knowledge. I can explain how to ride a bike, I can even do concrete studies with examples on what does and doesn't work, but ultimately you won't learn until you try and fall on your face a few times.
But it's really useful to work with someone who knows how to explain these things and what to look out for so you don't fall on your face too hard. You won't necessarily learn anything super applicable from a thread like this, but you want to work with a CTO who can write it.
And if you read a few of these, you'll start to notice patterns and will be able to look out for things as they come up in your work.
The other side of it is that people prefer the feeling of having learned (by reading) over actually having learned (by doing hard work). And what else is the dude supposed to do? Someone asks you "hey what are your lessons" and you go "Sorry kid, you won't get it until you try this yourself for 20 years"?
The trick to tacit skills is mentoring. A balance between doing and talking. You need to do the work and it helps to have a mentor who can set up a safe environment for you to fail in.
As a mentor: if all you do is synthesize, you sound like a preaching old bastard, if all you do is exercises, you’re throwing them to the wolves.
You have to design a playground. Safe but looks dangerous and exciting so kids can learn to overcome challenges.
And if you do it right, nobody will ever notice. All credit goes to the student for overcoming a challenge. But if the kid gets hurt it's your fault.
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: the key words to look for in a mentor are "in my experience ..." and "in the past I've seen ... work well"
Continue reading about Why learning and teaching the good stuff is hard
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