For years, my career progression looked strange. I loved the adventure: always an entirely new set of problems to face; new fires to put out. I moved through seller onboarding, sourcing, freight forwarding, customs processing, inbounding. Then Supply Operations, working with ShipForm Amazon. I worked strongly in Seller Central, both supporting the sellers, and as backend T3 Support. Back in the FSS, I established processes in ISS and ICQA. I started implementing process and systems. Then flow. From there, I went into pick. Then ship dock. Then outbound as a whole. Then network processes and systems. Systems became my implementations. Whistle stops. Then instead of just systems architectures, I began developing softwares. My job grew to include new site launches, regional HV systems mitigations, ROC and equipment management. I did investigations, logic systems, software development, and architected operational systems.
On paper, that might look like a lot of bouncing around. That’s not really how it happened. I was following the bottleneck: the pattern was really quite simple. Fix system A, and system A produces more. System B becomes the new constraint. Go fix system B. Then C. Then another building. Then a region. The work kept moving because the constraint kept moving. Making one site strong in a region exposes the next opportunity.
I didn’t need a career ladder, the system kept telling me where I was useful next. Amazon and their 10% percent helps the bottom 10% policy just happened to align with me becoming extremely qualified at making systems that consistently made sites produce at the top 10%, and quickly expose where risk existed for the bottom 10%. THE FIRST SIDE OF THE MACHINE
I originally came into Amazon from the seller side. I was recruited by Amazon; it wasn’t a job that I sought out. After the Army, computers were kind of my therapy. 7 years and most of that in active combat, returning to life as a normal people was not a transition I imagined I’d survive. That is also very much how combat presented: for me, once I survived long enough not to sit in the corner and piss down my leg, and I trained my brain to get over the terrified part of “I can die at any moment,” life became very different. I stopped worrying about going home, I had to prioritize differently. I acknowledged that the chance of survival was less than the chance of not survival. From that position, I calculated equitable behavior. I determined that my greatest longevity was by behaving like a lunatic: always choose the most unreasonable and unpredictable action, always do something that no one could ever presume, guess or calculate. I was very unreasonable, and always on purpose, because I believed that being unpredictable would afford me the longest tenure to do the most good.
The Army kept sending us kids: less than 20, signed up for weekends with the national guard. They had no life experience beyond high school, and many of them never had jobs. I was tired of watching them cower in absolute paralyzing fear for a few weeks, and then just be a body in the morgue trucks that were just a part of the convoy. I expected never to return to civilization. I made choices that crossed lines I believed excluded me from participating in normal human society again. I never expected that a time would come that I had to live with myself after becoming a human that had done some of those things.
When we caught Saddam, there were 6 of us left, that had that long standing tenure. We could look at each other and know, and know that nobody else could look at us and share that kind of “know.” None of us expected we would ever go home. We were humans that were more scared to live like normal people in normal world than to stay and continue in combat. It was shocking the moment it was over - devastating. Suddenly, “we have to go home now” was terrifying. We did what we did and never expected that. It seemed more impossible to become citizens again than it had to be adjust to a life of combat. We were not humans that were fit for normal life: we made decisions that obviated our qualification for that ever again. It was devastating to stand there holding a rifle and realizing that now the real combat was about to begin. The plane home - scattered throughout the fuselage of a C130 - was almost painful; the closer we got to a hero’s welcome home, the more weight that accumulated, the more fear.
So, coming home, unreasonable choices that were likely to result in death just continued. Not bullets. Not enemies. Not fighting. Just unreasonable life decisions, wondering if I would make it though the day. 2 liters of 40 proof was pretty much the quota. The Army called it “Terminal Leave,” and I felt like that was about right: I had no desire to partake in it, and I certainly didn’t want to survive it.
After scraping myself out of that endless puddle of vomit, I learned that being broke and hungry drove me just a little bit harder than being guilty, angry, self loathing and self defeating. I didn’t particularly want to survive, but, some freak force biology was somewhere inside of me that wouldn’t let me starve. In my head, I would have chosen not to eat: that was my choice, yet, somehow I was incapable of allowing myself to let that happen.
Before the Army, I was parentless and alone. I didn’t know much of the world: I had a sequestered life, much of it around dairy farming. I didn’t do school like normal kids, and when I was 15 I went to college. 17 was the Army; that was my “only opportunity to ever have a shot at success.” Coming home, I didn’t have anyone. Had no where to go. Had no belief that the world held anything great for me. I was breathing air, with no direction, no motivation, no desire for anything more.
But computers - that’s something I did well. I made custom build computers in 1995. Paid $495 a week for radio ads. Built custom computers, had my little business, paid for my college. Then, I was one of the first 250 sellers on eBay; I had to lie about my age. So eBay and computers, that’s what I knew. Once the leave dollars exhausted, I got into commercial construction. Good hard work. No social skills required. Build a building, then its built. Then 6 months of maxed out unemployment, self loathing and selling shit online. That’s literally what I lived for: selling shit online. I don’t know why it spoke to me, but it was the only thing that took ahold of my heart.
Years of building, becoming a licensed engineer-in-training. Running job sites, and running online sales. That was it, build websites, sell shit, help other people sell shit. That’s what I had going on.
One day, almost 8 years into that, I got a random email from a “browse.com” email address. I was aware of what “browse” was, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I didn’t believe it. Frankly, I had been so into my eBay -> google traffic growth, I really didn’t care much. I felt like it was some kind of a trickster. I was no online amateur, I certainly wasn’t naive to the antics on online tricksters.
I was curious enough that I couldn’t not investigate. I had to look into it. I knew it was a rabbit hole, but I had to go down it. I couldn’t not.
Going into it, my biggest turn off with cadabra, browse, now amazon, whatever you want to call it, Bezos bragged publicly about how he extorted a glitch with a major book wholesaler. He was the first true online guru: his ego and cleverness caused a compulsion to demonstrate his genius to anyone that would be an audience.
The glitch:
Bezos started as a dropshipper; he did not maintain his own inventory. That is some OG dropshipping. What he did was: when he got an order, he went to a wholesaler, who had a minimum order of 10 books. He went to their website and purchased the product that he needed to fulfill. Then the “glitch” he bragged about exploiting - 9 books that didn’t exist. That is how he started his company.
His first name “Cadabra” was based on “Abracadabra,” because of his magical glitch. He also considered using names like “relentless,” “awake,” “browse,” “bookmall,” and “bookmail.” I was pretty turned off by Amazon as a whole, because I remember his early days: bragging of starting a company successfully on deceit. And the names for his enterprise were telling of the human behind the naming, behind the operations.
The first non-employee customer was John Wainwright. Fun fact: Seattle HQ is named after him. But that book. I may not have become sucking into the black hole that was amazon if any other book had been the first transaction. That stupid book got me.
“Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies,” by Hofstadter, had become an instrument in how I communicated with humans. I loved analogies for communication, to ensure clarity, point of view, approach, mechanism.
Before 1995, I had thoroughly read any book on AI that I could get my hands on. I loved early AI concepts, logic and mechanisms. It helped to me organize my own thoughts into translatable output. When that book came out, I had own it. It was that essential to my life: and in 1995, getting books was not easy. Few even knew how to use the college libraries to order a book and wait weeks for it to arrive, just because they had to know what was said in page 183, and then consume the preceding and following context. “Fluid Concepts?” Essential
That was a rabbit hole I delighted to fall into. Jumbo, Numbo, breadth-first, depth-first systems. Cytoplasm. Eliza Effect. SME. ACME (later purposely used in Amazon’s online verification same acronym, different meaning).
Then there was Ractor and the half-beard. I got lost in the Goldbach Conjecture again. Then the Turing Test. It took me back to the roots that compelled me to carry the completely useless 286 laptop to college in 1995. It was the reason I needed to have an email in 1993 with not a single human to email. It was my roots. It was my logic. It was the foundation of how my brain worked, and what it delighted itself in. THE INSIDE OF THE MACHINE
Turns out: that email was not bo-jazz. I was recruited as a seller on-boarding specialist. Before accepting the role: I had to know more. I got my hands on “Fluid Concepts and Creative Realities.” For a lot of reasons really, but I did believe that somehow, someway, there was an answer that would present itself inside of that book. There probably is an answer in there still. Clearly, there was an answer then: I took the job. I am “famous” for my analogies in teaching Amazonians Amazon processes.
So began the advancement into full on Amazon submersion. I couldn’t help myself: Early AI concepts caused me to love the logic, the approach, the manual calculations of square-round transitions as a hobby at 14, to learning C, and making my thinking apparatus use it for all reasoning. I couldn’t say no to Amazon. One suspect email. One book that took me back nearly a decade to when I had purchased it. Then down the same historic “memory lane” that it compelled me to venture down the first time. I was consumed, and I love it. That was exactly how I wanted to spend life thinking. So, that’s what I did: I couldn’t have said no if I had wanted to. I had to help people who already had successful brick-and-mortar businesses make the jump into Amazon.
I wasn’t solicited to be an Amazon employee, it was just a vendor gig. Essentially: Amazon would pay me to travel to a site, provide training, resources, and, when they needed an on-boarding specialist for a new seller, I had to prioritize their clients. Amazon would pay me a flat fee per client, and I would work with them until a particular sales threshold was met. Each client would be a member of a Amazon group of existing Brick and Mortar store owners that existed to assist them to plug into Amazon and to scale to the level of increased sales that Amazon would provide.
It wasn’t as simple as opening Seller Central and uploading products. Some clients sold fitness equipment. Some sold vitamins. Some sold books. Some sold shipping materials. The Lean Six Sigma approach that Amazon prioritize paired well with my “C” If → Else methodology, and I was able to easily and effectively navigate through any industry, at any level, and provide real solutions to humans that already had established, operating businesses.
Many of these business people had tremendous experience with wholesale purchasing. Graduating to pricing, shipping, sourcing, fulfillment: that was a whole new world. The future scope and lead time weren’t entirely new concepts, but there were many more steps involved for these clients than what they had founded their businesses on. Often we went from a seller being proud of a variety of products to focusing on one product at a time: source, ship, customs, ship, inbound, launch. That was probably the biggest stumbling block overall with established business owners.
It was a fun experience for me: there were always so many projects in my head simultaneously, and they were all so different. Life was a constant adventure. “Always a new adventure,” is probably the best description that I could ever give my Amazon experience. At every level, every day presented with its own unique, individual fires to put out, and I was in love. I couldn’t help myself. I’d get sucked into the black hole that is Amazon and I couldn’t escape its pull: and that was perfect. Just a huge adventure I couldn’t get enough of.
I started with humans. An idea. Then we checked the globe and found factories. Sometimes it was India and clothes. Vietnam was an amazing source for textiles. China has everything. Then there was learning ships and captians and boats and ports and customs. And trucking, the warehouse and warehouse transfers.
I worked with hundreds of businesses pre-Seller Central. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know what happened on the other side. I learned the system before the product ever touched an Amazon fulfillment center. I learned how an idea becomes a physical object. How the object gets identified. How ownership is represented. How the item enters a catalog. How inventory becomes eligible. How the product crosses oceans. How it gets through customs. How it becomes visible to a customer hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Then I went inside the machine. Being a vendor in those early days allowed me to “peek” inside of the operation inside of Amazon. Every warehouse was so cool to me: it was like a little computer, each associate off to fetch something, to package something, to deliver something to a trailer. When the truck left - that was “cache” clearing. It just made perfect sense. THE NEXT CONSTRAINT WAS ALWAYS DOWNSTREAM
Once you start improving a process, the part immediately after it becomes more important. That was my career. If inbound becomes better, inventory accuracy matters more. If pick becomes better, pack gets hit harder. If pack becomes better, dock has to absorb more. If dock becomes better, the yard and transportation plan become the constraint. If one building gets better, the downstream building can become overwhelmed. If several buildings get better, the problem becomes regional flow. That is why the progression wasn’t simply: inbound -> pick -> pack -> dock -> flow -> regional, just because those were the next jobs. It was: fix this -> expose next constraint -> go there -> fix that. At some point, the work stops feeling like career movement at all. WHEN A SITE WIN IS A NETWORK LOSS
One of the easiest mistakes in large operations is celebrating a local win that makes the network worse. Imagine a site processes every possible unit and celebrates a great night. Then the last scheduled trailer leaves only 30 percent full. Somebody can look at the building metric and say: Great job. But if another site in the same region had freight that could have filled the unused capacity in that trailer, the network may have paid thousands of dollars for a victory that existed only inside one building. The building won. The network lost. That distinction mattered to me. I didn’t want one building to look great while somebody downstream was buried. I didn’t want trailers moving half empty while another site needed capacity. I didn’t want one site hoarding equipment because it had found a way to push more volume while another site couldn’t operate. If I optimized one building too aggressively without looking at the rest of the network, I could create exactly the kind of failure I was trying to solve. So I had to move. THE JOB LOCATION FOLLOWED THE CONSTRAINT
There were buildings where I could increase outbound capability enough that the next problem was physically somewhere else. A sort center downstream could become overwhelmed. Trailer utilization would shift. Go-cart and equipment needs would change. Transportation requirements would change. A building that was engineered for one level of volume could suddenly be operating at multiples of what anyone expected when it was designed. At that point, staying in the same building is not necessarily useful. The building isn’t the problem anymore. The network is. That is why site ownership was never the obvious end state for me. Owning one building would actually make the system smaller. Regional flow made the system larger. I liked the larger machine. I liked moving around. I liked being able to see how one decision changed everything around it. And there were personal constraints too. I did not want to relocate away from my kids. So the career path that might have looked obvious from the outside was never the only thing being optimized. Life is a system too. THE 2020 CONVEYANCE
The clearest example of this whole pattern is a conveyance system I helped engineer in 2020. This was not a normal installation where a beautiful standardized design showed up with every component selected in advance. COVID had destroyed normal equipment availability. Nobody was manufacturing conveyance on a normal timeline. So the available strategy was brutally practical: acquire whatever industrial conveyance could be found, sometimes from multiple incompatible systems, and make it behave like one machine. I was physically and virtually involved in the installation and troubleshooting. Sensors. Speeds. Diversion logic. Stacking areas. Container eligibility. Dock-door relationships. Where boxes were allowed to go. Where they were not allowed to go. How the physical machine and the virtual logic agreed with each other. And it had to run. Not occasionally. Roughly 23 hours a day. There is nowhere for a bad theory to hide when steel, software, people and freight all have to agree for 23 hours. Later I came back and pushed the system beyond twice its original capacity. Eventually the operating envelope had moved so far that what had once looked like high-volume performance became ordinary. That is what happens when you keep removing constraints. The next one gets louder. FROM THOUSANDS TO TENS OF THOUSANDS
At one point, a high-volume event around 20,000 pieces could feel enormous. Later, ordinary days were exceeding that. High-volume events moved north of 60,000 units per day. The numbers matter, but the important thing isn’t the number itself. The important thing is what the number does to the rest of the architecture. More volume changes staging. It changes labor. It changes trailer requirements. It changes door utilization. It changes downstream sort capacity. It changes maintenance requirements. It changes the amount of freight waiting at every point in the system. It changes which bottleneck matters. You can’t simply celebrate increased throughput and stop thinking. Every improvement changes the question. THE BUILDING HAS A SHAPE WHEN IT’S HEALTHY
After enough time inside a system, you don’t consciously calculate variables. It is a feeling: something that becomes a part of you. It exists in your fibers and you operate on exactly the same frequency as the system that surrounds you. You don’t have to look at something, you become a part of it. It is as noticeable as a tap on the shoulder. You can hear a notice and know something is wrong. You can see can see flow in your periphery and know that its off. Metrics get outgrown walking the floor. You know when a staging area is starting to become the next problem. A tiny local change can become hundreds of jackpot packages, a stopped conveyor, a trailer problem, an equipment problem, a downstream problem hundreds of miles away wondering where their equipment went. THE BOTTLENECK KEPT MOVING
And I can’t honestly sit still anyway.
The true irony is: I spent 5 years working with AI before the AI rollout. I was a member of 12 humans selected for a global rollout team. That distribution of AI was the largest global AI rollout, and, it was the largest AI behind a guardrail rollout that has ever happened.
For me, AI brought me into Amazon, and, it was for AI that I left. And no: I am not the worlds biggest AI fan, I always favor true false logic and deterministic. Its node.js that the rest of the world needs, not AI. One true/false decision at a time is what automated Amazon, the mechanism that cleared every bottleneck. Still does.
What looks like a scattered career from the outside makes complete sense to me. I kept fixing what was in front of me. Then the next thing broke louder. So I went there. Sometimes the bottleneck was a process. Sometimes, a piece of equipment. Or a conveyance design. Whatever it was, it was always an adventure. Still is.
That fateful day years ago, believed that hearing from browse.com wasn’t the most exciting thing that could happen to me. But: it became one of the most substantial things. I learned so much about making progress, not taking hard stands, allowing “organic” flow and energy to provide guidance and remove barriers and constraints. It let my systems brain delve into the algorithms of operations, that was the dream I didn’t even know I had.
And the people. Connecting with humans across the globe, the different cultures, the different languages, all of the different pieces that came together to make a product an item on Amazon. I loved being inside of the product process. When the people part meant having a team: people to teach, people to coach, people to show things, people to help grow: it was the people who really brought the human and connectivity to my world in ways I never expected.
I hadn’t expected to stumble into a world where the human was the system, and the messy condition that is being human was just okay. Amazon hired me into a remote, digital world, and nothing could have ever brought me more connectivity.
Sometimes it was staffing behavior. Sometimes it was another department. Sometimes another building. Eventually multiple buildings and
And so my life became: What happens next? Where does it divert? What exceptions may present? What happens when I fix this bottleneck? And I love it: I cannot stop.
The Amazonian rollers have disappeared. The passions hasn’t.