Some thoughts on my new employer
There is plenty of trepidation among some employees of The Washington Post with our sale to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. I am not one of these people.
I admit that I have some misgivings about it, as all people do when the signature on their paycheck changes. But for me, and the teams I have been on, we have already begun to construct an ethos of efficiency required to operate in a news organization with big ideas and a small checkbook.
My team has changed significantly in the past two years I've been at the Post. We've gone from 3 people, to 12 people to 22 people (std. dev. of 3), and with that bump has come a large share of the responsibility.
For the past year or so, we have been operating with a fairly ruthless efficiency that I believe embodies the spirit of our new benefactor. Our applications and software run with a minimum number of engineers required. The irony of using Amazon's Web Services is not lost on me. Through that service, we have found a way to serve massive numbers of traffic to our applications while keeping the number of servers we use to a minimum.
We have created a culture of small teams, large impact that I hope will spread to the rest of the Post and maybe the community at large.