[awsthro00945]

I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank".

I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience).

Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.

[rhoulihan]

Actually, I was a direct report to Colin Lazier (https://twitter.com/clazier) who is the GM for DynamoDB, Keyspaces, and Glue Elastic Views. I was the original TPM for DocumentDB before joining the Professional Services team as a Senior Practice Manager to head up the NoSQL Blackbelt team which led the archtecture/design effort for Amazon's RDBMS->NoSQL migration. I was brought back to the service team by Jim Scharf to lead the technical solutions team for strategic accounts, but I maintained the org chart role of Senior Practice Manager until I left for MongoDB.

Compensation was a minor issue. I was an org chart aberration already and AWS pulled out all the stops to retain me. I will always appreciate the opportunity that AWS provided me and my time at DynamoDB will always hold a special place in my heart. I really do believe that MongoDB is poised to do great things and my decision had more to do with being a part of that than anything else.

[gigatexal]

Whoa straight from the source!

[belter]

You never heard of Rick Houlihan? He is the 90% of DynamoDB Evangelism... At the same time you are able to this internal lookups? Do you work with DynamoDB?

AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k

AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo

AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M

AWS re:Invent 2021 - DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0

Amazon DynamoDB | Office Hours with Rick Houlihan: Breaking down the design process for NoSQL applications https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806

[amzn-throw]

Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company?

This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him?

Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner.

But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many deep internal engineering challenges to solve.

[awsthro00945]

No, I haven't. There are thousands of reinvent sessions every year. I don't watch them all (I don't watch hardly any of them, and most people I know in Amazon watch a couple breakout sessions if that. Some don't even watch the keynotes). Their targeted audience is AWS customers, not internal engineers. Reinvent itself is a sales conference. If internal Amazonians want to learn about something like DDB, there are internal talks and documents given by the engineering leaders that we watch.

>At the same time you are able to this internal lookups?

I looked him up on LinkedIn. Nothing internal about it.

[gigatexal]

was not me at r/aws

unless he posts here about it we can't really know -- we can only speculate but I think he had a higher amount of influence than his title/rank might suggest. I think Rick's influence with respect to DynamoDB is akin to that of Kelsey Hightower's influence over k8s at Google.