2023-11-19 13:03:19
She started her practice in 2004 while studying Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. After graduation, she was hired by the same company full-time. The challenge would be great, because the employer would be the giant Amazon, which at least recently has gained a bad reputation for working conditions and thousands of layoffs.
20-year-old Beryl Tomay started the world’s largest company with the largest turnover from the sale of goods and services over the Internet, and one of the first to rely on the Internet to provide its services based on actual sales of consumer goods.
However, as The Wall Street Journal reports, it seems the day did not start well for the young talent.
In the first year, Beryl Tomay made a software code change to Amazon’s order confirmation page so that incoming customers would see the page blank for over an hour. He was just six months old when he made the coding error that crashed the order confirmation page on Amazon’s website.
After that, however, the error progressed to an even greater one. Made a change to the Kindle e-reader database. It is an application that puts millions of books, magazines, newspapers, comics and manga in the hands of readers. One can thus read anywhere on the bus, on a break or in bed, for example.
However, the change he made prevented users from logging in or downloading anything, such as a book. But this time the error was so big that even the head of the company and its founder Jeff Bezos himself, took it for granted, noticed it and sent an email to ask about the problem.
However, these two errors of the new Tomay could not fail to put the company’s mechanisms on a small “alarm”. They called on her to submit a report on what really happened, but also what she would do to prevent these mistakes from happening again.
“Those blunders of hers were not grounds for dismissal, in part because mistakes in code are an understandable part of a programmer’s job. However, those failures made her develop an ability to overcome those awkward moments,” the publication says.
“It was a pivotal moment for me,” Tomay said. “Especially early in my career, one thing I’ve struggled with was building stamina. How do you deal with that and how do you pick up the pieces, learn from it and move on.”
Third failure
However, the problems were not over. A few years later, in the early 2010s, Tomay led teams working on Amazon’s Fire Phone, a smartphone designed to compete with other high-end phones of the time.
Although the phone, launched in 2014, never really caught on, becoming one of the biggest fiascos in its history.
“Although the project failed, Tomay said the failure taught her again that positive lessons could be learned even from mistakes. Some of the technology for the phone, for example, was redeployed to other devices like the Kindle,” the American publication writes.
The counterattack
The then 22-year-old employee of the company managed to get her “blood back”. Having been put in charge of the Kindle team he was able to perfect the automatic synchronization that occurs when Kindle users read a part of their book on one device and then switch to another.
Describing the concept in 2015, he said: “I’m at the grocery store on my phone. I’m waiting in line. I can read for five, 10 minutes. Then I go home, grab my Kindle, and pick up right where I left off. It just works.”
With the Whispersync app, as it was called, the then-young Tomay, together with Bezos and eight others, managed to get an Amazon patent for the technology.
Its most recent patent is from October 2023 for an automated system to generate safety tips for drivers delivering packages.
And Tomay said she gained experience hiring teams and trying to create a vision for a new product, which she carried over to her later leadership roles.
New challenge and change in style
After working on the Fire Phone, Tomay tried her hand at Amazon’s delivery business, which was new to her. He joined and later headed Amazon’s Prime Now venture, which provided fast deliveries of toiletries and other consumables. Prime Now eventually joined Amazon’s broader efforts to speed up deliveries for groceries and other products, a service that has become critical during the pandemic that has kept people at home.
The health crisis became one of the biggest challenges of her career, both because Amazon was flooded with orders overnight and because of her role as a senior executive who was responsible for workers who were strained by demanding working conditions.
As she received complaints from many of her colleagues about how the demands of work were adversely affecting their personal lives, Tomay helped create the “org days” program so that employees could set aside work duties eight days a year. So they could focus on themselves, their mental health and volunteering.
So, as she says, she went from analytical to more… compassionate.
Tomay said she had to adapt quickly to the crisis, meeting daily during the peak of the pandemic to meet increased demand for products while implementing new policies and workflows at the company’s hundreds of warehouses. She said she still strives to grow as a leader and create better ways for her employees to learn and grow within the company.
Today
Today, 41-year-old Tomay is in charge of a critical part of Amazon that is at its busiest right now: She oversees operations and technology in the company’s package delivery unit. This is the logistics department that makes sure the packages arrive at the customers’ addresses.
She says she learned a lot from her first mistakes, and to build up after failures. That’s why she’s more than willing to talk about the mistakes she made as a young developer at Amazon, speaking at company events and writing about the lessons she learned in the hopes that her experiences can help others who are just starting out.
With Amazon’s profits tripling to nearly $10 billion from July to September, the delivery capabilities of the company, and Tomay’s team, will be tested in the coming weeks ahead of the holidays.
Of course, the working conditions at the company continue to remain controversial despite the personal progress of the skilled programmer.
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