281–290 of 418 posts
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It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture. But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platf…
It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture. But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platf…
The path requires far more finese than "always create a platform". You need to balance over-engineering with the ability to re-evaluate previous decisions.
I agree Google has wandered far off this path, but imnot sure they are on any more well defined path than Yahoo. They just happen to be earlier.
I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…
So why does anyone good work at Amazon? And if the only people left at amazon are most crappy people willing to take the abuse, how can they build such a thriving company?
I left before my first vest as soon as interesting start up showed up (start up didn't survive, but at least it was fun).
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Europe and Australia have forever ruined me with their standard 4 weeks of vacation time. I can't fathom ever going back to anything less.
Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...
So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.
I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…
Your rant paints a bleak picture, and I hope my experience of the last 2 days was coincidence.
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> of course, and I had to do it- RIGHT THAT MINUTE- in the middle of the night. There is your problem right there. Why in your sane mind would you even consider fixing it at that moment? You should have told them to FUCK OFF - right at that minute - and gone back to sleep. Right there and then a loud and sound go fuck a rake and fuck off.
You're absolutely right. It would have meant I lost my job. When Bezos is posting on a ticket, everyone knows it. All the pressure rolled downhill right onto me. This means that, even if I did tell them to fuck off, I wouldn't have been able to get back to sleep. On some level I would have felt I was shirking my duties, and after all, I'd lobbied hard to get it fixed, months before. I think, ultimately, it is kind of…
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I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, like other people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team you join. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internship on. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to know which teams suck and which teams are great, and so I ch…
My AWS team was good. I enjoyed my work as an intern. However I was warned that work in the group is operations intensive. I could see that myself in those 12 weeks. As an intern I was not given any operations work. Obviously it will change when I join as a full timer. As noted below I am looking at other AWS teams, Kindle silk browser team. I need to find out about these teams.
Silk is probably a neat team to look into as well. They're building a cool product, they're still a small team, and they have good leadership. The director in charge of it used to be the head of Builder Tools and he's great.
But yeah, talk to a lot of teams and ask them about the things that are important to you (operational load, current/future projects, code quality standards, whatever other things you can think of to ask) and see if any of those teams sound cool to you. I won't lie and say that every place in Amazon is perfect, but if you choose well I think it's possible to find a great team to work on.
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That's very normal in the US.
If I recall correctly, the US is the only developed country without mandatory minium paid employment leave (federal employees excepted). Which small-government fans might accept readily, but it also has amongst the lowest actual average vacation times… Apparently free citizens want to work. (One statistic had the Canadian average lower, though) Strangely enough, this doesn't seem to have a straight-forward correlatio…
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Yes, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? If those horror stories are true (and we have no reason to doubt they are), it kinda shows that the way you treat your employees doesn't really matter to your success. It certainly matters a lot to them; it matters from a moral point of view; but from a practical point of view the only individuals whose happiness matters are the customers. Of course, if your employees are so…
On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream o…
In my book, it means that bean counting has taken over productivity. That's no place to be a software developer.