Since my first day in AWS 5 1/2 years ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I wrote about it here. If you work at AWS, use the URL in the screenshot below to find it.
I wrote a little script to try and classify where I spent my time. Here are some quick, very unscientific results.
I participated in 2882 meetings, 75% were probably technical discussions and 25% were not, including business reviews. I made 1013 code contributions, reviewed or read 364 documents, mostly technical designs. I did 192 1:1s with my colleagues, 130 interviews, and helped with 80 promos. I debugged or otherwise dealt with 175 customer-facing issues, authored 78 documents, took 64 trainings, and engaged in 48 planning exercises.
This, of course, doesn’t tell you anything useful. If you actually want to learn more about what PEs do at Amazon, check out the excellent Principal Engineer Roles Framework that I have been using since 2019 and that was made public this week by Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec.