Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Home Services

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 247 posts

Re: Amazon Home Services

#111

Post by sanderjd »

LunaSea wrote: post #75
bederoso wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it. Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determin…

The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1... and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.

The he-said/she-said of these comments makes me think that nobody is actively distorting, but that it's just such a big company that different people can have wildly differing experiences.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#112

Post by eropple »

bederoso wrote: post #100
LunaSea wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1... and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.

How does me, a single person and a simple SDE, being defensive (was I being defensive just because I wanted to clear up misconceptions?), says anything about an entire company's culture and image?

You called him a liar. That's pretty defensive.

Personally, I have no trouble buying a lot of what he's selling, not least because I've seen his posts around here for a good while and he seems like a decent sort, but it also dovetails with my own experience. YMMV, but I'm not calling you a liar.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#113

Post by jbb555 »

kardos wrote: post #78
flyinglizard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll address some points here. 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are bare…

> 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. The first or second time the blades on one of those drones hits a kid, drone delivery will be as dead as the Segway.

Yeah I heard that some kid once got hit by a bicycle, that's why those have been banned for years. Oh, and right, I once bumped into someone in the street, I guess that's why they closed down the streets.

But yeah, things might possibly go wrong from time to time so best not to try. Giving up is always they best thing.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#114

Post by CPLX »

stingraycharles wrote: post #9
dkyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup . They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (…

> - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?)

Amazon is an online hypermarket, and I don't think that's even remotely a secret.

People understood the company mission of Sears, Roebuck, & Company, a hundred years ago, and they can certainly understand Amazon's today.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#115

Post by eli »

caractacus wrote: post #27
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #3

Amazon can now let me hire a goat herder[0] to get my lawn eaten down. Is there anything they can't sell? [0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UBYDXXQ/ref=vas_sf_GoatGrazing

Simply there to grab publicity. Someone in marketing this heard the word 'viral' and read about Goat Simulator and something clicked.

I don't quite get all the cynicism.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#116

Post by ghaff »

nknighthb wrote: post #63
michaelt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear "drone delivery" I hear some PR guys spending $500 on a hobby drone, carrying a trivial weight a short distance within line-of-sight of a manual operator, then we don't hear any more about it. Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.c…

Last week, Amazon's VP of global public policy testified before the Senate Commerce Committee[0] about the FAA's delays in approving testing in the US that they've already begun in other countries. An FAA administrator testified in the same hearing. This comes more than a year after Amazon's initial announcement on December 1, 2013.[1] This is the same VP, by the way, that testified before the same committee in Janua…

I'm very very skeptical but, by all indications, Amazon does appear to be quite serious about it however much it initially looked like a PR stunt.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#117

Post by CPLX »

flyinglizard wrote: post #59
MCRed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that is DOA. It will never work because it will never be economical, nor safe. If you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize it's a joke-- like an April Fools joke.

I'll address some points here. 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are bare…

> 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently.

Aside from that whole thing where they have a dozen or so whirling knife blades that could take off a body appendage, or the fact that one small power failure or an inflight impact with a bird or a wire turns them into 30 pound falling lethal skull crushing objects.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#118

Post by CPLX »

shubb wrote: post #76
practicalpants wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their drones could easily be $30k+ a pop, and if they crash, need maintenance, irretrievably fly out of range, or simply become targets of angry people wanting to break them... all problems frequently encountered with high grade hobbyist drones.... then their value vs. an employee is questionable. Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost,…

And anyway, driverless cars are happening. Why do you need a drone when the robo uber taxi had a robot arm in the boot and delivers packages during slow times of day? Drones could be useful for a lot of things but if the problem is delivering heavy packages cheaply to places with road access, they are not a rational choice.

> And anyway, driverless cars are happening.

By "happening" you mean "not used for any real purpose besides research or demonstration anywhere in the world" presumably.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#119

Post by Perdition »

rplnt wrote: post #98
flyinglizard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.

The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. Light drones also can't fly when it's too windy, too rainy, too cold. And they can only carry a very small subset of usual shipments (limited size and weight). Automated cars on the other hand...

I can imagine all the people complaining about how they have been waiting for three hours for an Amazon drone delivery while a hurricane rages on outside.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#120

Post by GabrielF00 »

MCRed wrote: post #30
dkyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup . They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people…

When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.
Post reply on HN