Interview with Shel Kaphan

[walkitout]

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1

4 pages at GeekWire. Shel is ... clearly still Shel: somewhat full of himself but basically reality based and, I must grudgingly admit to agreeing with him on the bugging-Bezos-about-government-regulation issue.

Emphasis on grudging. Which has pretty much always been my reaction to Shel.

It would appear that he is more or less happy, and I suppose that's a good thing.

OTOH, the guy is _still_ complaining about too-many-meetings. When I think back on what I went through to try to get _any_ kind of meeting, any kind of information pried out of that skull at all, when our primary goal was to detach him from the day to day enough so he could actually take a day off, I'm surprised I'm not still grinding my teeth.

It was kinda fun, altho I'm still cranky about the 2 digit year code. Not a line of code was written until 1994 and it _still_ had to be fixed for Y2K.

He's absolutely right, however, that in the beginning, no one had any idea how far that little bookstore was going to go. Not even Jeff.

Comments

[jkonrath.livejournal.com]

This is an awesome article.

What employee # were you? I don't remember if you left Spry before or after me. (I left in mid-96)

I always forget about the DE Shaw connection. I later worked at Juno, which also came out of there. What's weird is, Juno had main offices at the Bertelsmann building, but we also had some overflow offices at the DE Shaw office across the street. Now, my current company has its NY office in the same building.

a litle before you

[walkitout]

I seem to remember starting in March. I asked to be included in the headcount layoff, so I got double paid for about a month and used it to pay off my CRX. I was somewhere in the mid 30s, assuming you count warehouse and everyone; if you're counting programmers, I'm tied for 3rd with E. (who is mentioned in the article) and S. who was my significant other at the time. [ETA: T.S. would almost certainly argue with this characterization of "programmer", because he would expect to be included in the list.] Paul Davis (then Barton-Davis, which was sort of weird because IIRC I got in trouble with his wife who was staff at the UW when I was an undergrad there. I made a very stupid error with a shell program that caused problems that she had to deal with. I still feel bad about that.) was leaving as we were arriving. It was a rough transition (not pbd's fault).