A lesson about self awareness from PagerDuty cofounder Alex Solomon

Before launching  IT operations management platform PagerDuty with his cofounders in 2009, Alex Solomon had earned his street cred as a software engineer for Amazon. The time he spent there, and in particular the projects he worked on and the specific challenges associated with them, would eventually lead to the creation of PagerDuty, a startup company that to date has raised over US$83 million in venture capital funding and employs over 250 people.

At the time Solomon was working there, Amazon was undergoing some pretty major transformations as a company. Perhaps the most major of changes in that era pre-2009 was when the company moved from a monolithic code base to a micro-services based architecture.

It was with that change that Amazon changed the way it approached engineering. Rather than the entire department working across all the technology issues, smaller engineering teams were formed that took ownership of the software and services that they built. This meant a software engineer at Amazon would now write code, test that code, and deploy what they had created, with those new smaller teams managing it in production.

What that meant is the smaller teams were also responsible and on call for any issues that arose around the products they created. If something broke in the middle of the night, the person ‘on duty’ at the time would receive an alert via their pager, alerting them to the fact there was an issue to be attended to for one of the products built by them and their team. Internally at Amazon this was known internally as being on “pager duty”. Read more

Mat Beeche - Startup Daily - 15 Jan 2018