25 Years in Tech, and counting
Welcome to my newsletter
Hi everyone, I’m Joshua Burgin, and this is my substack. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I plan to write on technology with the occasional side-journey into economics, business and occasionally philosophy.
Why these topics? Well, I’m a technology executive with 25 years of experience and with a college degree in Philosophy. I started my career as a software engineer and one of Amazon’s first 100 employees (more on that below), and then moved into product management at venture-funded startups, and then into engineering & product leadership roles at some of the world’s largest technology companies (including Zynga, AWS and most recently VMware). Hopefully you find my perspective useful and I’d love to hear from you directly, or in the comments as I post my thoughts.
My origin story (in tech)
I had my first job outside of college working in the Bell Labs corridor, - northern New Jersey, on the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States - at a traditional enterprise software company. I even had some stock options as the company had just gone public, but after 6 months there, I knew that if I wanted to grow my career fast, I needed to write code on west coast with the “cool kids.” A friend of mine saw an early job advertisement for a company called “Amazon-dot-com” in the University of Washington newspaper (a printed version, like they used to have), similar to the one pictured below and so I faxed my resume to “Amazon.com” in late 1996 - a few days later I had my first phone screen, and then they asked me to fly out to Seattle in the fall of 1996 for a full day of in-person interviews.
Fun Facts about my 1996 Interview
I had hair back then!
I wore a men’s suit & tie to the interview because you did that on the east coast (my former colleagues still talk about this suit — it was a dark green linen suit)
I wrote code on an actual keyboard live in one interview because I didn’t know you were supposed to use the whiteboard
I interviewed with the Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s single floor office (yes, we all fit on one floor! No, I don’t think he remembers me). I was shocked I got to interview with the CEO!
I was pretty sure I did well in the interview but waiting back at home during Thanksgiving week for the call was pretty nerve wracking. The waiting paid off, and I did get an offer - which required me to take a 20% pay cut and move across the country to a place where I knew almost no one. So I took the leap of faith, and have been in Seattle and technology ever since.
Even after taking the job I thought would go out of biz in 6 months (online books?!?) & I’d end up at Microsoft. Instead I spent 3+ amazing years inventing the world of e-commerce from 1997–2000, and then 14 years doing various other things before coming back to Amazon, this time in Amazon Web Services (AWS) - where I worked from 2014-2021 in a series of executive/general manager roles. Since early 2022 I’ve been at VMware, running the product & strategy functions for the multi-billion-dollar Product and Cloud Services portfolio.
I couldn’t have predicted where my career would go 25 years ago, and I can’t predict the next 25 years, but I have learned a few things along the way that I can share with you. Hope this helps set the stage for this newsletter. Please subscribe if you want to hear more.
As always, my opinions are my own, and not reflective of current or past employers. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to receive new updates and support my work.