71–80 of 178 posts
Somehow, Amazon's "working backwards" principle always fails when it comes to establishing reasonable procedures, SLAs, and solid documentation.
It's really remarkable how much Amazon's reputation has been self-destructing in the last year or so. Even 6 months ago when I told people I thought Amazon was an all-around shitty company (having worked there) and shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as Google, FB, etc., people looked at me like I was insane. Somehow the stock keeps going up... I don't have any material insider info but just on a hunch I doubt…
Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit.
Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.
I can go on and on. But generally the place is ran like it's a sales company primarily. Not an engineering company.
Amazon has a cancer through out it. It's basically a shitty copy of Microsoft without any of the virtues..but all the vices.
Not to mention, it says a lot that they have no perks except "free tea." 12 Leadership principles, which are dumb shit like "Be curious", "Have instinct."
Amazon doesn't have the brightest or the best - they have sheep that get tangled in the middle, or assholes that somehow become management. The company is only surviving because it set its margins so low that no one else could compete.
But now market leaders are sprouting out. Chewy.com for pet food. Walmart.com for general goods. Drugstore.com / Soap.com / Walgreens.com, the list goes on.
With such a shitty internal culture, Amazon will fall. I will have a shit-eating grin when that happens.
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Amazon Web Services was their saving grace. But having seen internally how each team has different practices, different tech..some that are arcane and esoteric. Theres no cohesion. Even the CSS for Amazon, theres no sheet that is shared. Each team has to hard-rip the colors and whatnot from other projects like the retail site.
Makes me totally re-evaluate AWS after seeing how its built internally.
The charm of AWS is that every service in that goddamn console looks like its a polished part of a pyramid of engineering sanctity.
Heh, wrong. Each service...written by a different team, with totally different methods, totally different tech. Some teams even use .NET and IIS... You can probably probe the endpoints to some of these services and maybe see it externally. But well, take my word for it.
Once a team has a decent AWS project, they slap together a new logo. Make the UI blend with the existing panel. And then scale it using existing AWS services. But it still is a hydra of mismatched code.
The whole thing is a frankenturd - they did a good job with the design, ui, and IAM policies to make these services look like they are all part of the same cohesive development. But it simply isn't the case. AWS is patched together like a paranoid android on the inside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're definitely right that we don't actually know what checks they're prioritizing, but it's hard for me to believe they're actually doing any quality checking when this is the #1 skill you see in the app: http://i.imgur.com/Qp4Cv6k.png
The iOS app store was mired in fart apps in the early days. Many of them were very profitable. I think it's just a natural growing pain of any consumer-facing app store. http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/23/iphone-fart-app-pulls-in-n...
It's really remarkable how much Amazon's reputation has been self-destructing in the last year or so. Even 6 months ago when I told people I thought Amazon was an all-around shitty company (having worked there) and shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as Google, FB, etc., people looked at me like I was insane. Somehow the stock keeps going up... I don't have any material insider info but just on a hunch I doubt…
Having worked there as well and recently left, I'm super surprised as well to see them considered with the likes of Google or Facebook, etc. Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit. Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually not an issue at all, because even with native apps you can still load content from the web which apple has no control over, which is similar to Alexa. But the big deal that no one talks about is that Alexa is not compatible with EC2 backends, this is the most bizarre limitation I've ever seen, you can host An Alexa app on your own PC at home, but not on EC2.
> Alexa is not compatible with EC2 backends Source on this? I know last time I played with it, they weren't doing SNI (in 2015, what?) but I've never heard of it not being able to hit EC2 IPs.
And at the end they gave up and said that yeah its something deep in the implementation and I should use something else.
I don't want to post the mails but anyone can try it out !
It's really remarkable how much Amazon's reputation has been self-destructing in the last year or so. Even 6 months ago when I told people I thought Amazon was an all-around shitty company (having worked there) and shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as Google, FB, etc., people looked at me like I was insane. Somehow the stock keeps going up... I don't have any material insider info but just on a hunch I doubt…
If Google and Facebook are cities, Amazon is more like an army. Can be city-scale depending on the nature of the conflict. They have great power, and in some ways the very same kind of power as a government. But at the same time the power structure is more ad-hoc, and subject to falling into collapse or docility when not led by a strong leader.
In some ways, I think Steve Jobs realized the was more in he Bezos category, and that Apple couldn't really carry on without him. So he deliberately changed his management style, developing a leadership class and stronger cultural inertia in terms of process and values. He wanted to leave a city behind him, not a headless army.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are assuming that the only purpose of certification is to catch actively malicious developers. I can think of many other perfectly good reasons to have one: to make sure server response times are fast enough, to make sure it fits the guidelines for types of content they want in their ecosystem, to make sure it doesn't blatantly violate any trademarks, etc. I don't think the concept of a certification process is t…
But that doesn't refute the parent's point: since the content at a URL is inherently mutable, they could judge that (at time of submission) some app is the type of content they want in their ecosystem, and then seconds after approval, it no longer is.
Or Amazon video on Android device I have -- in order to have play prime videos it told me to disable app source checking and side-load some .apk file, which will then help me get the Amazon video apk file... or something. Yeah forget that. At first I thought it was a joke of some sort. But I guess that's how you are supposed to do it. I'll just stick to Netflix and watch videos there. Somehow that manages to work wit…
(The most sensible-sounding negative claim I've heard is that Amazon do that so that they can do more invasive location tracking than Google permits (though the same kind that Google does themselves))