211–220 of 247 posts
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Are you OK with your kid taking a copter blade to the face for the team? Wait, I mean, for Amazon?
Are you OK with your kid taking a FedEx bumper to the face for the team?
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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?
I don't think this is game changing. Home Depot and Lowe's are already in that space and they haven't changed it. The reason is that construction is refactoring and debugging much of the time. Typical houses are built on the LAMP stack, not Rails. A lot of configuration and many of the conventions embodied are Rick 's and Rick ain't around. There are lots of corner cases built into any structure, and clean quick and…
And when he did, they asked him for his driver's license. There's an annual limit to how much you can return without a receipt. Home Depot doesn't care so much, because if you're returning things that way ... they're just giving you store credit. You're going to have to buy something again and eventually, you'll end up spending lots of money there. It works out for them in the long run.
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…
"Amazon makes dozens of "products" every year, to do press releases, to sell more Amazon stock/keep the stock price high."
That's quite a leap of logic. Really thought it would have been that $90B of annual revenue that was keeping the stock high.
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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…
Not true, if you are in the lower %20 you will get fired. That's the pressure to "get rid". Of course they will let you "resign" instead of get fired, and if you refuse they will give you a financial incentive to resign. This keeps the "stats" better, and probably where boredoso gets his nonsense. But here's the real kicker that makes the company so stupid- if you're on the lower half of the rank, you're blocked from…
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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…
> As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.
Totally untrue. I spent many years at Amazon, with most of my managers being managers by trade and half of them being openly non-technical.
>> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back
> The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).
If you are not a manager, you do not have direct visibility into this process and cannot make this claim. If you are a manager, then you're aware that every department is run very differently and should also be aware that some of them are very political.
I'm curious on what you think separates Amazon's interpretation of stack ranking from the "bad" versions, or how it is "barely" stack ranking at all.
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You have a higher opinion of the value of Amazon's guarantee and brand in this space than I do. You're talking independent contractors here (just like Home Depot and many others use today) and you can expect lots of outcomes between didn't show up or didn't do the promised task and did a perfect job. Even with contractors I know and trust, things don't always work out perfectly when you're dealing with unexpected pro…
> ou have a higher opinion of the value of Amazon's guarantee and brand in this space than I do. In my personal experience, they're one of the highest rated companies I've dealt with, in terms of customer service. They've earned that credit with me over the years that I've purchased items from them.
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Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to…
Am I the only one who can picture thieves shooting these things out of the skies and running off with the packages? I guess it's no different than following the UPS truck and taking the package after they've left, but intercepting a drone farther away (say, over a field somewhere) is probably less conspicuous.
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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…
> I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless…
What absurd nonsense. If we are having a rational discussion we only care about what he has to say, not how he says it.
Leave the doublethink and doublespeak for the politicians, it doesn't belong here.