>Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be?
In many regards, yes. The bar had to be lowered to meet the demands of growth. We've also taken in a lot of hires from companies that have brought their culture and friends with them. The culture at Amazon is not what is was even 2 years ago. It is in many places day 2.
No one also seems to notice that Amazon retail often suffers widespread issues like this. We can count on SEV1's happening during peak as things blow up badly. This has happened several years in a row, and sadly the themes are pretty much the same across all: forgot to scale (yes...really) or some stupid system bottleneck. It doesn't help that Amazon retail has a good amount of its workforce based in India and seemingly disconnected from the Seattle based leadership.
For those unfamiliar with internal Amazon lingo, a big deal is made of it always being "day 1"
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/13/jeff-bezos-says-it...
Not only that, but I've noticed that Amazon has started using way more contractors (not actual firms, but more Mechanical Turk/UpWork like contractors, if not just straight up misclassification) and agencies within the past year or so. I can't say that I'm surprised that Amazon is having technical issues now that they've grew in numbers but not in technical chops.
On a side note, it is a great time to become a recruiter in Seattle with all these agencies popping up. /s
Do you sense any attrition like that?
Could you expand on this a bit, please?
Mental health is enough of an epidemic that $company_with_exponential_scale is most definitely going to pick up a fair chunk of people with various issues, cognitive included.
Chances are this is even part of why the bar is a bit lower.
(Said as someone with mild high-functioning autism)
Do they really need 1 million servers? Many of my friends who work at other tech companies need such few servers in comparison even with significantly high traffic that just screams massive inefficiencies...which seems wrong.
But I've never worked at Amazon so I wouldn't know.
But we didn’t handle free-form text search like Amazon. I can imagine that would necessitate a huge scaling up of compute and data.
and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.
I think Amazon has taken on an outsized image to many people that just isn't true. We have good engineers in many organizations, but we don't pay enough, have the right strategy, or take care of individuals well enough to lure the kind of great folks you find at other big tech companies. In many ways, Amazon is a retailer that does technology because it found a way to make money from it. The DNA is still MBAs/finance and retail.
Its true Amazon has some great engineers but is not a very engineering centric. I remember a senior engineer in Retail once comparing it to a plumbing system kept together with bandages.
Bottom line is Amazon is a product culture not an engineering culture and that makes it really easy to leave for Google or unicorns that really appreciate tech debt tradeoffs.
In simple terms, bar raisers are current Amazon employees that come in during the interview process to analyse candidates. They do this alongside their own full-time job, assessing as many as 10 candidates a week and spending 2-3 hours on each one.
In other words 20-30 hours per week on top of the full-time job? That doesn't sound quite right.
10 candidates in a week may happen at some kind of event, but then it isn’t 2-3 hours per candidate, and in that case you’d effectively be taking a couple of days off from your normal job.
I love the Amazon customer service. They’ve managed to crack a difficult problem and execute enough that other Giants haven’t come close to it yet.
GCP and Azure tail AWS by quite a bit. Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.
So Amazon can do a lot of things wrong, but I’d have to say they get the important parts right.
Not even particularly close. Amazon doesn't even have a majority of online sales, although it's getting close. They seem like a much bigger force than they are because of growth.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...
They got some parts right, some parts awfully wrong, and some are just irrelevant now. They make money, they are cheap + convenient, and that usually what people focus on. They are not sophisticated, they are not great designers, etc.
A PM who has never opened an IDE in his or her life and who is only familiar with “coding” concepts through Wikipedia. They read books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb and majored in one of the humanities. When they’re shown the webpage that the geeks created which loads in 2 seconds, they tell the lead developer that they want the loading time cut down to 1 second and the font to be changed.
I understand that it’s not always easily fixable. But honestly this looks pretty bad. Could be anything from bad code to a flakey cable.
I got out of high volume websites - too much marketing, unpaid overtime, and horrible work-life balance.
It is not a binary state of absolute destitute and top notch brilliance, it's a trend that can move one way or another and will show itself in more frequent outages, poorly rolled out products, lazy design and etc.
The plumping can keep on working for a few years even after it begins to erode. Historically there are many examples of this.
Amazon has always been toxic and frugal, so obviously it didn't interfere with whatever mythical software quality it had in the past.
And today's failures might be because past engineers built unstable unmaintainable systems and then ran away.
And of course amazon is 10, 100, 1000 times larger tech system than it used to be.
Which in turn tells me they didn't test the failure case. Now, Amazon is a huge and complicated beast so I don't want to imply this was a "dumb" mistake, but (assuming I'm correct) it is a failure that risked making MORE failure, so it's not demand alone to blame.
As someone that's been going through quite a bit of depression because Amazon was the best offer I got (as opposed to Google or Facebook because I'm still bad at coding interviews) I'm afraid this is the straw that's going to break the camel's back for me. This is exactly what I was afraid of and exactly what I have waiting for me when I join next week.
There's no point anymore.
Why do I see literally everyone else have their dreams come true while mine don't?
Let me tell you: it will be OK, and the other posts about making the best of your situation are true. Amazon is an incredible learning opportunity if you stay open to it. I'm still working there a year later and I'm building far higher impact projects than my friends at Goog and FB because like another poster said, Amazon lets SDE1s work on just about everything. The growth potential is tremendous if you show you're competent and willing to learn.
Chin up, you're in a good position :)
Nowadays they have to be impressed by the project too...and mine's front-end development on an internal service nobody uses.
they have a lot of really amazing and smart people. but like anything in life, its what you make of it. I'd say put your best into the position and try to learn as much as you can from others. no good reason to do less
There are a lot of amazing and smart people, like you said, but there is also a lot of stress, heartache, and trouble if you don't keep your ear to the ground and build a strong network of people to give you an early warning. Don't keep your head down and concentrate on tech and building cool stuff: Amazon can be way too political for pure techies to thrive without strong protection from management.
You need to realize that your doing great, folks would kill to get a job at Amazon, the scale and the challenges are mind bending compared to what most other companies deal with and the interview is grueling and you made it.
Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet and Amazon thinks that you are a person that can help tip the balance.
I can personally point to two friends who I consider top notch engineers and designers that have left Amazon because of its toxic culture. I'm sure I'm not the only with these anecdotal examples, we've all heard the stories. At the end of the day years of unbalanced work/life balance, overly aggressive management and frugal approach to everything makes for a weak argument for A players to stick around.
Could this be an example of crumbling engineering standard at Amazon?