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Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#111

Post by mbesto »

plandis wrote: post #76
x2f10 wrote: post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

You're 1.) implying that Amazon isn't actively trying to fix it (otherwise they would be "walking the walk") and 2.) that it's a widespread issue (all I've heard about counterfeit products are from a few HNers)

Re: 1) I know for a fact they are.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#112

Post by dmode »

x2f10 wrote: post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

I once tried to purchase a pair of sunglasses from Amazon. That space is littered with counterfeits. The product page proudly proclaimed "Sold by Prada", but if you look carefully it is fulfilled by some shady company. Then you read the comments and realize that this item is not a original Prada item.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#113

Post by Spoom »

plandis wrote: post #76
x2f10 wrote: post #66

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!…

You're 1.) implying that Amazon isn't actively trying to fix it (otherwise they would be "walking the walk") and 2.) that it's a widespread issue (all I've heard about counterfeit products are from a few HNers)

I've encountered this recently when I had price alerts set for the Nintendo Switch. Third party sellers flooded the market with below-retail offers (they soon wised up and made slightly above-retail offers).

These sellers filled up pages of the available products list and had very little feedback on their profiles. People who actually bought from these sellers never actually got their consoles and had to file an A-Z claim with Amazon to get their money back (the seller always marked it as "shipped", so the credit card payment went through, but never included a tracking ID). I would imagine they were long gone with the money by the time Amazon processed the refund.

Thankfully my BS detector went off and I stopped trusting third party listings for that product.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#114

Post by JustSomeNobody »

devopsproject wrote: post #49
joshaidan wrote: post #36

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issue…

I used to work in call centers. The job has almost nothing to do with helping customers. Your manager will tell you the customer is the top priority, you will be told that the only person more important is you: the direct contact with the valuable customers. Then he will publicly berate you for 15 minutes if your average handle time deviates from the last hour. Your type of call is a golden goose. I get to "resolve"…

By definition, that person is not a manager. He's a boss. Managers manage, and Boss's react.

This is one of those times where you line up another job, wait until he goes off on you and for every "point" he tries to make, you counter with the policy. Shut him down. Won't be permanent, but oh well.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#115

Post by noxToken »

zentiggr wrote: post #61
polysaturate wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An actual serious answer: It's a line chart that shows story points starting at the top left in the beginning of the sprint. Which shows all points to be done, trending towards 0 points with 0 days left in the sprint, in the lower right. Linear means that the same points are done each day to allow the line to be perfectly linear between the top left and bottom right.

Sounds like exactly the sort of not-actually-a-real-metric metric that would entrance a number cruncher. Forget those moments of excellence where everything gels and you could get days or weeks ahead... Sigh.

It's a metric that can help identify patterns within a team. It only works if everyone is honest with the amount of work they've done, and they consistently report time in the same manner.

A pretty common burn down chart would have a somewhat linear slope in the beginning, a somewhat less sharp slope in the middle (mid-sprint slump), and a sharper decline to close out the sprint strong. Notice I said common (more likely to happen) and not ideal, because there truly isn't such a thing as an ideal burn down chart without context. What is ideal to one person/team may be completely different to another.

I personally track my time spent in an IDE slinging code or in app testing using an external tool to help me identify patterns. Purely in terms of time spent in IDE/app, Fridays are my least productive day by about an hour. Mondays are my second least productive. I am at my peak on Wednesdays. Thus I try to shuffle heavy loads to mid-week and the easy, gimme-task for Mon/Fri.

Just like a burn down chart, there isn't some ideal way productive time spent at work should appear on a graph. Well, I guess ideal is 100% of the day in IDE/app , but productivity would plummet. Humans just are not that efficient. Graphing my time gave me insights on how my week/month plays out. Burn down charts should do the same at a team level.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#116

Post by taurath »

cmurf wrote: post #39
smokeyj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about our democratic process. The process is you pick one of two parties. Then you get into a face bloodying fight with the other party. Nothing gets done, then you pat yourself on the back for doing your part. When you come to the realization that nothing has been accomplished, you blame those who didn't participate in the brawl. Suggesting that people work ON the process rather than IN the proces…

It's more complicated than this. And because it's so complicated, people look at ways to make participation more efficient. Party affiliation happens to be the most common way people participate, because it's efficient. But it is inherently inaccurate, you don't actually know the person you're really voting for with this method, and you don't know their position on specific issues, and you don't even know non-politic…

Most of the republicans I know have reflectively taken the position that money is speech, and they know it because thats what their reps vote for.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#117

Post by zeteo »

Conspicuously missing are a couple of other ingredients of Amazon's success. There are plenty of companies out there with "customer obsession" and a "day 1" mentality. There are few others with such good investor relations that money keeps pouring in after two decades of paltry or negative earnings [1]. With this kind of "infinite runway" you can sometimes afford to lose $100 million over three months to drive a competitor out of the market [2]. You can also afford to negotiate sweetheart deals with UPS and FedEx that will offer you delivery rates and speeds available to few other companies [3].

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...

[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...

[3] https://sellerengine.com/should-you-use-amazon-discounted-up...

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#118

Post by fidget »

lubesGordi wrote: post #99
fbonetti wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common metric used in the Scrum methodology. You start off the "sprint" with a set number of "story points" (say, 30 points), and end the sprint with zero points. When you graph the team's progress over the course of the sprint, it should ideally form a linear, downward slope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart

This kind of thing makes sense if you were doing something like digging a trench, where the progress can be linear because the task A is the same as task A - 1. Why would anyone think that given a variety of tasks that each would take the same amount of time?

No one does, you estimate each task to have a different number of points, which modify the task's contribution to the burndown graph.

I guess the idea is that points should correlate to time (questionable), and if you're estimating perfectly, that should give you a linear burndown graph. Which is stupid. What might be less stupid is that if you want to get some idea of how well your team is estimating tasks, compared to i.e. this time last year, you could look at the volatility (across several sprints) this year compared to last year, and a lower burndown rate volatility might suggest that the team has improved at estimating the duration of tasks.

However, when you just focus on the volatility as a metric, then people start optimizing for it, which is not the point at all.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#119

Post by tootie »

GVIrish wrote: post #79
_gi12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the…

> This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. You are describing this far more charitably than I would. I would describe it as idiocy. For some (idiotic) reason some management types have this belief that when they measure some metric, it should fit some ideal shape when they put it on a graph, whethe…

We had a client pushing us on our velocity. Our team was doing a quality-first approach which took far more time than the other team's approach to pitch stuff over the wall to QA and wait for bugs to roll in. Our leadership took the deliberate approach of gaming the points system to improve our appearance while keeping the team 100% focussed on deliverying quality work at the same pace we had been all along. We didn't change a thing except inflate our estimates and the client was happy :)

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#120

Post by dkural »

zeteo wrote: post #117

Conspicuously missing are a couple of other ingredients of Amazon's success. There are plenty of companies out there with "customer obsession" and a "day 1" mentality. There are few others with such good investor relations that money keeps pouring in after two decades of paltry or negative earnings [1]. With this kind of "infinite runway" you can sometimes afford to lose $100 million over three months to drive a comp…

He didn't start out with that kind of size. He built it from nothing, with strong competitors like Walmart who had more volume for physical goods that could negotiate better deals with UPS and FedEx for years.

AWS is beating Google, Microsoft, etc. Those companies had as much free cash flow and more engineering resources.

He has good investor relations because he produces great returns.

So, yes, your facts are correct, but you are wrong in an essential way: Investor goodwill and the market position is built by Day 1 mentality and customer obsession, not the other way around. A few bad moves will quickly erode both. Look at Blackberry, Dell, HP, Nokia, Westinghouse, Samsung etc. All these companies had massive market positions and investor confidence, with stock prices to match.

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