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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#121

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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.

This. I don't know any other major tech company that generates these horror stories with such a reliable regularity.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#123

Post by galfarragem »

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison

Re: Amazon Home Services

#124

Post by kardos »

jbb555 wrote: post #113
kardos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you OK with your kid taking a copter blade to the face for the team? Wait, I mean, for Amazon?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#125

Post by bederoso »

robotnoises wrote: post #110
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…

Could you expand a little on how Amazon does stack ranking in a more palatable way? As a consumer, I love Amazon, but I have heard a lot of horror stories first-hand from an Amazon employee about this very thing.

You won't get fired for no reason, but you do get compared with your colleagues.

But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better leader and influencing more people. There are people who spend 10 years as SDE II and are happy with it, because they don't care about leading others, they just care about doing their job, and this is fine.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#126

Post by jebblue »

This is cool, my wife saw a report on one of the morning talk shows and mentioned it. Glad to see a reputable company (Amazon) who knows the consumer and how to deal with lots of small businesses is going to be a goto point for sourcing home project help.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#128

Post by shubb »

CPLX wrote: post #118
shubb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have cars navigating america autonomously as we speak. [1]

From a regulatory perspective, I think driver-less cars are making better progress than drones, because auto regulations are more relaxed than air.

[1]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3006700/Driverless-c...

... Oh god I just linked the daily mail. Sorry I'm at work and picked the first link when I googled.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#129

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #116
nknighthb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Home Services

#130

Post by xur17 »

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 see the drones as a last mile delivery solution. Rather than flying the drones all the way from the distribution centers to peoples' houses, they could drive their trucks out to your neighborhood, and then release a set of drones to deliver packages the 'last mile'. This would allow them to deliver a bunch of packages at once without the driver getting out of the truck, and larger packages could still be hand delivered for the time being.

Also, I'd imagine that the drones would be (remotely) human driven at least the first few times they drop off a package, so they can learn where to drop off the package (similar to how Google handles training their self driving cars). After that, they could drop it off automatically, but hand off control to a human if the environment looks too different.

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