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.
>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.