Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#101

Post by aphexairlines » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 1:29 AM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #5

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In f…

> 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product

That was a long time ago. As Jeff Bezos confirms in the article, Amazon is a constellation of services now.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#102

Post by aphexairlines » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 1:36 AM UTC

I wish the company would reveal some information on the internal systems he outlined in his letter. Amazon's architecture is impressive and its infrastructure teams build great stuff to help developers get their work done & deployed.

Exposing these things would be a powerful recruiting tool.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#103

Post by nupark2 » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 2:36 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #69

ZoFreX wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a "bad smell". Too many bad smells and you don't apply for a job, it's like Bayesian filtering.

Bayesian filtering that works both ways. In fact we currently take PDF/Word/txt/RTF at my job. I'd actual considering narrowing it down to just Word. The type of person who decides that they don't want to submit in Word is probably a type of person that's not a good cultural fit. And I guess we've already ruled out those that prefer to send their resume via smoke signals only. As an employer it is more important to f…

I don't want to send my resume as a Word document because I wrote it in LaTeX, and it looks correct as a PDF. I don't understand why you wouldn't do me the courtesy of accepting the PDF.

This seems like a good cultural filter to me (on both sides).

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#104

Post by shykes » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 3:38 AM UTC

cmelbye wrote: post #83

This is only slightly on-topic, but regarding the service-oriented architecture that he mentions at the beginning of the article, how would one implement this internal? Specifically, how would you communicate with your internal services? Just an HTTP API? Is that fast enough? Another thing I'm wondering is what's the best way to handle internal authentication between your frontend and some backend service for example…

DotCloud [1] is built from the ground up around distributed services. We use a custom rpc mechanism called ZeroRPC. It uses ZeroMQ [2] for transport, msgpack [3] for serialization, and some extra glue for RPC mechanics, discovery, event dispatching, etc.

Among other neat tricks, it allows us to handle synchronous RPC calls and asynchronous message passing in a unified way. It also maps transparently to any ZeroMQ topology.

Combine this with the recent release of gevent support for zeromq [4] and you get a fun, fun playground :)

[1] http://www.dotcloud.com

[2] http://www.zeromq.org

[3] http://msgpack.org

[4] https://github.com/zllak/gevent-zeromq

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#105

Post by abeppu » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 3:49 AM UTC

aphexairlines wrote: post #98

pkteison wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some negative stories about working at Amazon. I don't recall seeing anybody write that it's a great place to program. Anybody have any stories or links about the upside?

The upside is that the company has excellent developer tools and infrastructure (I mean aside from AWS), very accessible principal engineers, a huge amount of paying customers so your work has real impact, and it seems like most teams have autonomy to work and deliver in their own way. Within a week or two of joining I was given ownership of an important internal product while also getting up to speed on the main eve…

The opportunity to have an impact cannot be overstated. I worked at A9, the search subsidiary of Amazon. Given that a substantial portion of purchases go through search, we were always keenly aware that even improvements that appeared to be modest could have very substantial impacts to the bottom line.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#106

Post by chaddeshon » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 4:40 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #42

jordanb wrote: post #5

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In f…

I worked at Amazon from 2004-2007. On one hand, Amazon does some really excellent and novel work like Dynamo and AWS (S3, EC2, EBS, etc). They organize developer conferences and bring in really good people to lecture. They hire really solid distributed systems people like Pat Helland and give them reign to work with engineering teams to improve their designs. On the other hand, when you're in the trenches of a produc…

Good engineering can't take a backseat to features, deadlines, and keeping things running. Good engineering IS features, deadlines, and keeping things running.

If you aren't making features and meeting deadlines you aren't engineering anything. You're just messing around. Features and deadlines are the difference between science and engineering. There's never enough time, that's what makes it hard.

Of course, Amazon might be pushing time tables too far. I have no idea, and it seems like you do.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#107

Post by javert » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 4:51 AM UTC

forensic wrote: post #100

mkramlich wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a filter. just not a filter for qualities I want to see in a potential employer, or, in potential co-workers. i want to see intelligence, flexibility, efficiency, substance, creativity, modernity, human-friendly systems and an emphasis on ROWE, not warm bodies in seats like clockwork, or conformity. Word? I mean, in a world where PDF and plain text exists? And non-MS/agnostic systems, and HTML? Seriously?

A computer scientist against clockwork and conformity? All technology is about making stuff work like clockwork. That's like.. what it's all about. This applies to human processes just as much as machine ones. Conformity is one way to create good clockwork machines. Your reasons strike me as childish. Word is still the best word processor by far. Personally I respect people who use Word because it means they're willi…

What? Latex is way more sophisticated than Word. Forcing me to use Word rather than Latex is childish.

I'm not trying to mock you, I just really feel this way.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#108

Post by imrehg » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 5:03 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #70

ghshephard wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, that goes both way. Any engineer so fixated on not using Microsoft Word, and unwilling to submit a resume in the format requested by their potential employer, might not work out well in a number of environments where they might gasp be required to use operating systems, applications, and methodologies that they were unfamiliar with, or downright opposed to. Works out well for everyone - so, to some degree,…

I don't have anything that can (reliably) create .doc files that consistently view the same in MS Word as they do in the application I've created them (I create and update my resume in Pages on the Mac). Creating a PDF means I know what it'll look like when they see it. I once sent a .doc file to a potential employer, and when I arrived for my interview I saw that the font it had fallen back to (since it didn't have…

Google Docs? LibreOffice? Just make it simple, if they are about box ticking then it does not matter at all how well your resume looks (as e.g. a PDF version would).

I mean I feel your pain, Word Docs give me the cold shivers, but there are some tools.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#109

Post by georgieporgie » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

EricBerglund wrote: post #50

nerfhammer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone owns a copy of Word these days

True, but Open/Libre Office is freely available and can save to Word formats.

In my experience, for anything but the simplest document, OpenOffice will absolutely mangle all formatting.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#110

Post by thejbf » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 8:37 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #42

jordanb wrote: post #5

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In f…

I worked at Amazon from 2004-2007. On one hand, Amazon does some really excellent and novel work like Dynamo and AWS (S3, EC2, EBS, etc). They organize developer conferences and bring in really good people to lecture. They hire really solid distributed systems people like Pat Helland and give them reign to work with engineering teams to improve their designs. On the other hand, when you're in the trenches of a produc…

There is a balance between shipping a good product with good technology. If you are constantly pushed by deadlines and make things just work, it breaks stuff in the future. Any engineer that is continuously working under pressure of tight deadlines cant ship anything creative, solid, simple and open to change.

Good engineers also have to be good analysts. What often makes a programmer better is his/her opinion to say yes and no to products people/designers. But yet again there is a balance. haberman mentioned Google but I personally don't like the over-engineered Google culture. It's too left-wing, if tight deadlines are too right.