Comments on: Mission Impossible: Managing Amazon’s Datacenter, Pt II http://storagemojo.com/2006/09/26/mission-impossible-managing-amazons-datacenter-pt-ii/ Data storage info & analysis Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:02:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Robin Harris http://storagemojo.com/2006/09/26/mission-impossible-managing-amazons-datacenter-pt-ii/comment-page-1/#comment-6467 Robin Harris Sat, 07 Oct 2006 21:19:45 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=254#comment-6467 Amit, It certainly wasn't my intention to leave that impression with readers, nor do I think that is the case here. My take on this is that the attribution is not an Amazon issue. In fact, the system that has developers on-call to fix problems seems designed to assure individual responsibility and accountability with a very personal reward: a good night's sleep if your product works. As I noted, the issue seems to be with how credit for academic papers gets handed out, which cuts both ways. Having Patterson's name on a paper is certain to get more attention for the rest of the folks listed. If engineers went to cocktail parties, saying "In the paper I authored with Dave Patterson, Michael Jordan and Armando Fox we found . . . ." would get you a few status tokens pretty fast. I certainly don't fault Amazon. I'm not clear on why you do either. Robin Amit,

It certainly wasn’t my intention to leave that impression with readers, nor do I think that is the case here.

My take on this is that the attribution is not an Amazon issue. In fact, the system that has developers on-call to fix problems seems designed to assure individual responsibility and accountability with a very personal reward: a good night’s sleep if your product works.

As I noted, the issue seems to be with how credit for academic papers gets handed out, which cuts both ways. Having Patterson’s name on a paper is certain to get more attention for the rest of the folks listed. If engineers went to cocktail parties, saying “In the paper I authored with Dave Patterson, Michael Jordan and Armando Fox we found . . . .” would get you a few status tokens pretty fast.

I certainly don’t fault Amazon. I’m not clear on why you do either.

Robin

]]> By: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog»Blog Archive » Credit for inventions incorrectly credited or How companies go bad http://storagemojo.com/2006/09/26/mission-impossible-managing-amazons-datacenter-pt-ii/comment-page-1/#comment-6454 Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog»Blog Archive » Credit for inventions incorrectly credited or How companies go bad Sat, 07 Oct 2006 06:58:46 +0000 http://storagemojo.com/?p=254#comment-6454 [...] As part of writing about the Amazon Data Center management tool Maya, Storage Mojo which is an excellent and a unique storage blog contains details about credit for inventions in Amazon being incorrectly distributed or rather being falsely attributed to others. [...] [...] As part of writing about the Amazon Data Center management tool Maya, Storage Mojo which is an excellent and a unique storage blog contains details about credit for inventions in Amazon being incorrectly distributed or rather being falsely attributed to others. [...]

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