Amazon Home Services • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Home Services

#171

Post by justrudd » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 3:54 PM UTC

bederoso wrote: post #157

justrudd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. This is not strictly true. I was at Amazon for 4 years (2004 - 2008 in Supply Chain and Retail), I had 3 managers. Only 1 of them was a former SDE.

Hum, interesting, but SDMs still need to know how to code, it's even part of the interview process, do you know if this is true 100% of the time?

Don't get me wrong. My managers were (are) extremely smart. They did know how to "code" for the most likely definition of the word code. But that doesn't mean I would trust them to write a feature or to review what I wrote. They just didn't have the day-to-day knowledge to know what did and didn't work in the code base I was in.

And do I know if what is true 100% of the time? Asking coding questions in a SDM loop? I have no idea. While I was there, I was only on TPM and SDE loops.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#172

Post by sp332 » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #169

sp332 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.us should be for US stores. .com is more universal.

Back when Amazon was registered I doubt anyone was using .us for a company website, so changing everything to point to that years after the fact would probably do more harm than good to the business, plus the fact that they at the start were only US based, so a .com at the time would have and still is the best choice for a US based brand identity.

At the time, sure. But since then they've added a bunch of country-specific domains. The store aimed at the USA could be hosted on a .us domain by now.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#173

Post by ghaff » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

bentcorner wrote: post #168

MichaelApproved wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that so crazy? Depending on the service cost, my time could be worth more than having to deal with the headaches of finding and dealing with a trustworthy vender. Consider we're talking about $150 installation for something in my house, like a TV. That could mean knocking holes in the wall. Searching Yelp reviews and interviewing contractors can be time consuming. Then, if something goes wrong, my wall could b…

Even Geek Squad's rate is too high. Mounting a TV onto your wall is not a hard thing to do. Find studs, attach mount to wall, attach mount to TV, put on wall. I've done it several times. Granted, it's not fun, but it's not I'd-rather-pay-$150-to-not-do-this non-fun. Even if you're a high-paid professional it's likely cheaper to do it yourself (assuming opportunity cost for this time was work, and not, you know, enjoy…

Most of the services aren't available in my area so I didn't look too deeply, but the costs as a whole look pretty high. All of the assemble-something types of tasks look to be in the $200 range. While none of these fall into the "what fun!" category for me, they also don't fall into the "pay as much as the thing cost for a 2 or 3 hours of uninteresting but not difficult work" category either.

Frankly, I mostly know how to get hold of somewhat expensive professionals to do tasks that I can't easily do myself. What I want is cheap labor to do things I don't want to spend the weekend doing.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#174

Post by markpundmann » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

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…

It's kind of ironic how condescending you are towards amazon stemming from what seems primarily based upon them not being a "tech company". In school, you probably had the jock type people looking down on you, and now that you are in your own subculture of tech oriented people, you've taken their place at the top of the arrogance pyramid.

I think you need to reevaluate your outlook on giving advice. You seem to have a preference for more tech oriented companies which is perfectly fine, but their are a lot of other people on HN that aren't as techie as you. Don't trash a company and shout advice to everyone based on your own personal preferences for work.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#175

Post by HelloMcFly » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

bederoso wrote: post #67

MCRed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There is a significant difference between "stack ranking" and "forced distribution rating scale." Most companies use the latter, the former is much more rare.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#176

Post by jasonsync » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

nknighthb wrote: post #164

jasonsync wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Amazon will co-ordinate the retrofitting of these roofs to allow safe and easy access? Have you ever been up to a typical apartment or condo roof top? Sometimes there's a common area or party area - not suitable for leaving a pile of random packages though. Otherwise it's full of HVAC and utility stuff. There's no way on earth my condo board would approve the costs involved in allowing residents up on the roof or…

> And Amazon will co-ordinate the retrofitting of these roofs to allow safe and easy access? Easy roof access is typically the default. Landlords sometimes cut off access and a shitstorm ensues. Lawyers sometimes get involved, since it's legally hairy to cut off access to previously-accessible common areas. > Have you ever been up to a typical apartment or condo roof top? Several, and you can examine thousands more f…

Ahh I guess you don't live in an area with RAIN and WINTER where anything not bolted down to the roof generally gets blown right off.

The costs are significant if there isn't a prebuilt common area (rooftop patio). Because of safety, accessibility and liability concerns. Sure it's a big flat space, and it may be accessible in case of emergency, but it wasn't designed for regular use. These surfaces are designed for HVAC, roofing material and drainage of rainwater.

You want a safe drop location for drones that's also resident accessible and safe?

You're going to have to retrofit the roof to meet spec. Even if you already have a rooftop patio. And that means condo board and / or property management approval.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#177

Post by ajkjk » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

gchokov wrote: post #103

cheetos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a different U.S. than everyone else. It's clearly the other way around. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:usps.com+"zip+code" returns 120k results https://www.google.com/search?q=site:usps.com+"postal+code" returns 372 results

To be honest, everyone should refer to these as postal codes or at least address codes. No one refers to the ZIP code as Zone Improvement Plan code anyway.. so what is the use of these code in the real life?

'should'?

What's wrong with calling them Zip codes? That's how they're written everywhere.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#178

Post by icefox » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

robotnoises wrote: post #136

bederoso wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Thank you for your response. I haven't actually heard any complaints about promotion. Most of the noise I've heard has to do with firing, namely that less-tenured managers feel pressure to get rid of a higher percentage of their team members than managers that have a lot of years and political capital built-up in the company. However I suppose that it stands to reason that perhaps that phenomena is due to the fact th…

So if you make a mistake at Amazon your job is on the line? Wouldn't that incentive developers to be extremely risk adverse and play politics? Is it a "mistake" to get assigned to a project that is doomed? And what about the whole learning from your mistakes or the idea of mentoring?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#179

Post by cweiss » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

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.

I'm pretty sure delivery vehicles have been involved in injury accidents since the horse-drawn carriage days.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#180

Post by gchokov » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

fl0wenol wrote: post #160

gchokov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But if they can "personalize" the price they show me when I buy books, why they can't personalize the web site and tell me these services are not available in my country?

This is how you know it's just as much investor marketing as it is to get early adopters excited; they want their overseas investors to know that they're not just sitting on their laurels this quarter.

They better do something meaningful. AMZN investors are not impressed lately. Some of them waited for an year to be break-even :) But that's different story...