"There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever"
Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was working with?
Here's a mirror of the original essay: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
> #6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell.
Not to be too critical, but this blog post is a (in my opinion, poor) rehash of Steve Yegge's infamous Google+ post which he accidentally posted online. It's entertaining and one of the most influential memos I've read in the last twenty years.
His followup memo was great as well.
“graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science”.
Of course he’s more known for his decision-making ability as an executive but he clearly has a solid understanding of computing fundamentals as his memo on Amazon S3 characterized it as “malloc for the Internet” [0][1].
0: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/eight-years-and-counting-of...
1: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...
And his first office was literally for one desk. He clearly did some of the tech work himself.
He does have a CS background.
The "even if he didn't" you quoted already implies this.