So yesterday was “Take Your Kid To Work Day” for grade 9 students in all of Canada. My Dad is a Software Development Manager at Amazon so why would I not go there. My day was a lot of fun and it was definitely something I would not rule out for a job.
Here’s how my day went. When I got to the office all the other kids met in a meeting room. We were given some breakfast and we watched a quick video made by the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos. After watching the video we handed off to the Office Manager Elizabeth. She took us down the elevator to meet with the building manager for a building tour. The Amazon offices are in Telus Garden which is a big skyscraper in Downtown and is considered one of the most innovative and environmentally friendly buildings in North America. We got a tour of the building and she showed us a few floors that even our parents hadn’t seen. We got to see a floor that had only just been sold so it was still empty.
Once we had finished out tour we went back to the meeting room and had a quick video conference with some other Amazon Officer Managers across North America. We talked with Office Managers from Mexico, Phoenix, and Austin. They talked about some of the experiences they had each had working for Amazon. After the conference two other people came in to talk to us about mainly about what sort of course are available is at universities. I don’t think that it was entirely planned to go into that subject too much but I think the guy got kind of carried away. We then watched a quick video on Amazon Prime Air – watch closely as you might recognize where this was filmed! Once they were done we had one more presentation on what it’s like to be a software engineer. Then finally it was lunch. For lunch we had some Pizza.
In the afternoon we were with our parents. My Dad spent some time showing me the software product that he manages. The product is software that controls Amazon recruiting and covers everything to do with hiring people (for example advertising jobs, managing applications, arranging interviews, organizing paperwork, offer letters etc). Amazon currently has 300,000 employees and want to grow to 1 million employees by 2020. All that hiring will be done via my Dad’s software. Amazon is unusual as instead of building software to sell, a lot of the software engineers are building products that Amazon will use for themselves. With the recruiting software they have to build their own system as none of the products they could buy would be able to cope with the size and scale of Amazon.
After that I wasn’t really with my Dad much but I was in his team’s working area. He was only about 15 feet away but was busy with his work so I was sitting with a couple of the software developers on his team. I’m not sure if I want a job in the software industry, but I am very interested in computer design work – specifically working with PhotoShop and Illustrator so I was especially excited about the prospect of meeting some of the UX designers on his team.
At Amazon everyone has to work – so I was given a task to do. I was asked with making a new amazon sign that said “Amazon Refresh”. I had to base it off of the Amazon fuel sign.
The template I was given was formatted in Adobe Illustrator, so I downloaded a trial version. I have used Photoshop many times but had never used Illustrator. I am so happy I had the chance to try it out. I enjoyed using it so much and was able to learn the basics very quickly. Here is the final version that I made.
After I did my first draft I had some help from Sheena who helped me learn a bit more about Illustrator. She is a UX Designer so she uses Illustrator everyday in her job. She taught me how to center the image and told me which file formats to use. The differences between my first draft and final draft are not very visible in the final exported image, but inside Illustrator you could see where I had drawn over the original text. Sheena showed my how I could edit grouped layers in order to make it cleaner.
1st Draft
Once I had completed my image I talked to a few people and asked them some questions that the school had given us. I didn’t use the worksheet 100% but I used it as a starting point to come up with my main questions. I will give a summary of the notes I made when talking to each person.
The first person I talked with was Jan who is a Software Engineer.
- Skills Needed: Problem Solving, analytical, dive deep into problems
- Typical Day: Write a lot of code. Build, design, maintain, and test software
- Job Requirements: A degree in computer science, or a few years of industry.
- How easy to get this job: There is a lot of demand for software engineers
- Other comments: writing documents is annoying, best thing is working with customers, software gives you the power to build anything
The next person I talked with was Jason who is a UX Designer so I had a lot of other questions. We talked about design in general for quite a while and then I got to my main questions:
- Challenges: It can be hard to understand what you need to do. Be willing to fail.
- Typical Day: Lot of emails. Everyone is on the same page. Meetings.
- Job Requirements: No hard requirements. Drive to improve things. Knowledgeable of what you are fixing.
- How easy to get in: It isn’t the easiest. Easier now than it used to. You can get a degree in UX. You have to want it.
The final person I talked with was Anuj. He is my Dad’s boss but they work really closely so it doesn’t really feel like he is the boss. I talked with him a bit more about Amazon in general and I had a few questions for him. then at the end I asked him the main assigned questions:
- Skills Needed: Coding knowledge. Communication.
- Typical Day: Reviews from customer. Manage other engineers. Emails.
- Job Requirements: Engineering degree in computer science. MBA useful but not a must have.
- How easy to get a job: If your good at it it’s not too hard. If you do well in college you can make it.
- Other comments: Dealing with people who don’t know computers very well can be very annoying. Projects can take a long time. Getting to do different things is fun.
While employees are Amazon work hard, I found out that they also like to have a lot of fun. In between some of my interviews I had a game of table tennis against what was supposed to be the best player in my Dad’s team. In the first game we played I managed to squeak the win at 11-9. However when we played again later he managed to beat me 11-9. I also played some foosball with them. I suck at goalie but I’m not too bad at striker. Although when you play them you can tell they play a lot. They are very good.
To sum it up I had a great time there. It was very fun using Adobe Illustrator and I got to meet some of my dad’s colleagues and learn more about working at Amazon.
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