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A comment on Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according to LinkedIn posts. Parent comment

Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by shmatt on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:44AM (#33626118)
This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would survive, while the other teams products were thrown away

This goes all the way back to his early days (I think I remember a scene about this in The Pirates of Silicon Valley), but also reportedly multiple teams were building very different original iPhones

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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by no_wizard on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @11:51AM (#33626267)
I think this approach makes sense for hardware but not pure software.

I think its easier to adjust pure software iteratively than hardware. So with hardware, it makes sense to have different teams working on similar but different things because variations of ideas need to be fleshed (and thoughts that spawn off those ideas) and it can be hard for one team to do this iteratively.

If you're right and this is where it came from, I think largely pure software teams doing this are wasting resources, but if its hardware I don't agree its wasteful

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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by bitL on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @12:05PM (#33626533)
It was way before Jobs, IBM was using it ages ago.
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by kenjackson on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @12:17PM (#33626741)
Isn't this part of the premise of the book Hackers? Haven't read it in like 25 years, but that's what I vaguely remember.
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by warner25 on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @02:21PM (#33628950)
I don't recall this coming up in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, but it was definitely in The Soul of A New Machine, the story about Data General trying to build their first 32-bit computer.
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by kenjackson on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @05:09PM (#33631529)
Thank you... it was Soul of a New Machine. I don't think I even ever read Hackers!
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by kwertyoowiyop on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @01:47PM (#33628395)
Jobs gets credit for everything in computing the way Churchill gets credit for all the good quotes.
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by giaour on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @02:10PM (#33628757)
I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Hey, Churchill didn’t say that; that was me.”
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Re:Amazon staff laid off as tech giants cut costs, according... by kwertyoowiyop on Thursday November 17, 2022 @11:50AM (#33641672)
Well played, Abraham Lincoln!
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