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

151–160 of 247 posts

Re: Amazon Home Services

#151

Post by MichaelApproved »

mattmanser wrote: post #86
MichaelApproved wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Amazon guarantee would go a long way with me. Something goes wrong, I don't have to worry about battling it out with the contractor. I call Amazon and let them deal with it. I can't say it's worth double the price until I actually need to use one of their services but I would definitely accept a premium for the hassle free service.

You'd pay double for a guarantee?

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 be ruined. Taking the contractor to court to recover damages is a massive investment.

That might not be worth the trouble if I could have Amazon send someone and cover all headaches. It becomes dead-simple. "I'll just use Amazon's guy"

There's no question, it's a premium service, but you're getting real peace of mind with it. It's not like you're only paying for a brand name, you're also getting a guarantee from a trusted company.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#152

Post by jasonsync »

nknighthb wrote: post #150
jasonsync wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The urban environment represents the greatest challenge. For starters. "To your door" urban drone delivery would be nearly impossible as most urban dwellers live in condos, apartments or densely populated areas where landing or hovering presents real-world, safety, security and logistical concerns most likely impossible to overcome. The best case urban scenario is Amazon "drop off points". Basically small Amazon stor…

> For starters. "To your door" urban drone delivery would be nearly impossible as most urban dwellers live in condos, apartments Many such structures in densely-populated areas have large, flat, mostly-empty roofs. (Hell, some of the apartment buildings in my little urban area of ~40k people have flat roofs, as do most of the local dorms.)

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 having security collect packages from the roof. It's hard enough for security to deal with packages at the front door.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#153

Post by yelloblac »

aphexairlines wrote: post #32
MCRed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they stick around for years. When I found the mail order catalogs they were 3 years old. Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft. There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled…

In what way do they hate engineers?

Also curious about this. What does "at an executive level" mean?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#154

Post by roneesh »

Right now I work in the largest company in this field, Sears Home Services. And we're moving to Seattle... so this should be interesting!

I think anyone's first thought when Amazon gets into a business is that it's dominance is inevitable. Not so sure in this case, I've made tons of marketing pages just like this, hardly a guarantee of success. They'll have to do the hard work of convincing people they can provide quality service. You can't just return a home renovation if it goes wrong.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#155

Post by fl0wenol »

[deleted] wrote: post #142
wstrange wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And payload. A drone just can't carry any significant weight.

[deleted]

Those kind of drones are not the kind of drone that can deliver a package, unless that package can survive a ballistic delivery to the ground.

Sure, by shaping the drone into a winged vehicle you can get the payload capacity up and make it move quickly as it goes from waypoint to waypoint on a "delivery route", even in windy conditions. But now you can't deliver the package itself neatly onto the ground adjacent to obstacles like you could with a quadra-copter.

If someone can figure out a reusable payload delivery parachute or something like that with the ability to keep itself on course even in windy conditions to hit a drop point on the ground from a couple hundred feet up, and make it work with packaged goods the size of a small book or video game, then it has a chance.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#156

Post by delecti »

eropple wrote: post #112
bederoso wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to butt in, but if someone says something untrue, they are a liar. If I accused Amazon of killing babies, that would be a lie (I hope?), and you wouldn't be being defensive by calling me out for it.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#157

Post by bederoso »

justrudd wrote: post #144
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…

> 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?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#158

Post by DickingAround »

eropple wrote: post #112
bederoso wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems fair to call someone a liar if you know they've said something factually untrue. (I'm no weighing in on the debate itself, but it's possible for someone to be factually wrong and it's appropriate to highlight that when it happens.)

Re: Amazon Home Services

#159

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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…

Bederoso, I really liked your balanced comment, versus MCRed's derogatory one. I have worked at AWS for 6+ years and left a little over a year ago, and I pretty much agree with all the corrections you made.

I think Amazon is not an easy company to work at, mostly because engineers are squeezed like lemons but they don't benefit much from it. However, this can also happen at "cool" startups, or other large companies such as Apple.

Also, a couple of things are lies (but every company has its own set of lies); AWS was never based on Amazon's extra capacity, but that's something that came out and stayed there for years. And also, the "large volume, low margins" is not true in the case of AWS.

Other than that, I think that I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to have worked there; I've learned a ton and thanks to that I got a job I couldn't dream of ten years ago.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#160

Post by fl0wenol »

gchokov wrote: post #60
nknighthb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon.com is their US site. If you're there, you've effectively walked into a store in Seattle. If you want a store not tailored to the US market, you'll need to visit one of the sites they've made for other countries (where this is probably not available yet).

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.
Post reply on HN