Tag: Startups

Amazon HQ2

The Toronto tech scene is hot.  Last year, more tech jobs were created in Toronto than San Francisco, Seattle, and NYC combined.  By making Amazon’s HQ2 shortlist, Amazon essentially vetted Toronto as a great tech hub.  Amazon saved all these companies thousands of hours of research, cities put pitch decks together for all to see, and now tech companies are moving in fast.

In the past few months, Bay Area startup heavyweights and big tech-behemoths have announced they’ll be recruiting large engineering teams in Toronto. Uber announced they’re investing $200M to build an engineering hub in Toronto.  Microsoft announced they’re moving their Canadian HQ to Toronto. If Toronto becomes the site for HQ2, we should rename Toronto to Seattle2.  Amazon already has over 700 tech employees in Toronto working on Alexa, Supply Chain, and Fulfillment systems.  Their footprint here is already sizeable.  The Bay Area heavyweights are all talking about building 200+ person engineering teams in Toronto.  

This will have both positive and negative effects for sure.  It’s going to drive up the cost of talent, poaching talent away from promising startups to join more established companies.  I honestly believe that life as a software developer is vastly different at Amazon vs a startup.  But companies like Amazon and the more established startups serve an important part of this ecosystem, they are finishing schools for new grad talent.  I’m convinced after they’ve worked a few years in a big-tech company, they’ll itch to join a startup and have more impact.  

In the short term, the biggest losers will be early-stage startups that are trying to find product-market fit and have limited funding because the loss of talent will be felt most acutely. Time will tell, but I believe these developments are good for Toronto, but there will be growing pains.

The road you leave behind

The other day I updated my LinkedIn profile.  Many people congratulated me on my promotion to CTO.  The most interesting one was from someone who ended up doing the job I last had before I left Amazon.  I decided to reach out and see if he wanted to have a coffee.  I was curious how things were going.

I used to manage the software dev teams responsible for sortation systems across all of Amazon’s warehouses.  This problem space was operationally intense, the software had to be highly available and robust.  If these systems went down or misrouted packages, they affected a fulfillment center’s ability to meet throughput SLAs.  In operations, this is a big deal.

I wasn’t sure what to really expect.  Turns out he’s a super nice guy; he recently left the role for another within Amazon Fulfillment.  I was surprised, the first thing he did was thank me.  He thanked me for all the wikis and blogs that I wrote when I was on the job.  All this documentation really helped him understand the space, the evolution of the systems, how to actually do the job and the challenges he would face.  This got me thinking, I should start blogging again!

It also got me thinking about how important it is for startups to document processes.  At Wealthsimple we have a decent culture of documenting in Quip, but it’s not 100% universal.  I recently lost my sole technical recruiter.  To be honest, I wasn’t entirely familiar with the end-to-end workflow around how we used our third-party recruiting software.  I noticed many different teams were using it differently, inconsistency drives me a little crazy.  When I asked around if there was any documentation on the official HR process, I got blank stares.  Turns out there wasn’t any!

There’s no time like the present.  I sat down with one of my colleagues to use the software through the most common use-cases.  Along the way, we identified any potential process bottlenecks.  He then spent time with one of our recruiters to refine and document the process.

Documentation is the road you leave behind.  It’s also a high-leverage task.  Once written, it keeps on giving each time a new person reads it and it’s low maintenance.  If the reader finds a mistake, they’ll correct it.  It’s important to document so other’s don’t have to guess, rediscover or reinvent.  Someday, they might even thank you.