Before You Move Fast And Break Things

At Amazon, there's a tenet for principal engineers that reads "Respect what came before." I always wondered why it is a maxim for principal engineers and not for the general engineering population. It seems like everybody should abide by that rule. And then it hit me: It takes time and maturity to respect what came before.

Amazon, like all other large tech companies, likes to tout itself as a place for builders. Mark Zuckerberg famously encouraged folks at Facebook to "move fast and break things," and it's not just a motto for big tech. Approaching work and innovation with an emphasis on speed and experimentation is a formula many startups abide by because there simply is no time. Startups need to ship and pivot quickly; otherwise, they won't survive. Moving fast works.

But at some point in a company's lifecycle, moving fast and breaking things is a mark of immaturity. If the blast radius of mistakes is too large, the upside of moving quickly isn't worth the risk. An outage to the websi…