10 years ago, a younger me interviewed a brilliant young man named Tony for a position as a programmer at Metal Toad. Back then, I didn't know much about hiring (this was long before Metal Toad had implemented the WHO hiring process later recommended by Advisory Board Member, Amanda McPherson) so we were conducting a group interview, lead by me, where we peppered a prospective hire with random questions:
"What's something important about business?" I prompted.
In response, the young programmer went on to speak passionately about ethics in business, and the real burden that technologists carry as it relates to doing right by customers. He had personal experience working at companies where customers had poured out their life savings to build "an app" and either through negligence or willful ignorance, those companies had taken the money and delivered nothing that could have gotten the customers to where they hoped they would be. "Sometimes," he concluded, "it's just as important to tell customers to save their money, as it can be to deliver quality work."
Needless to say, we hired that man on the spot. And over the years, we learned several things about Tony:
A year after the interview he was a manager, a year later a director, then a vice president — and today he is our CTO, Tony Rost.
Metal Toad was honored to speak at the AWS Media Solutions Webcast Series last week. Tony brought his experience and passion to a group of developers and decision-makers eager to get in on the latest developments in metadata and Machine Learning (you can see the entire talk in the video reel below).
Beyond the fascinating nature of the topic — and believe me, Machine Learning is going to change a lot of things — I was incredibly proud of the way Tony spoke. It was not a sales pitch, rather it was a share out of a vision in which the Machine Learning tools at Amazon can be used by all kinds of programmers and companies in ways that simply weren't possible before.
For those who don't have time for the video here’s a quick highlight reel of the insights Tony presented: