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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#181

Post by legohead »

flyinglizard wrote: post #12
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…

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…

Can't wait to see hundreds of flying, buzzing drones zooming around the city.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#182

Post by iblaine »

Amazon seems like the Walmart of internet services. Amazon will find a niche that is profitable then, drive down the margins in that sector and bankrupt companies in its wake.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#183

Post by rhino369 »

grkvlt wrote: post #161
toyg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive. To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, wher…

> People will shoot them down for fun I hear this a lot, along with comments about self-driving cars being unusable because 'people will run in front of them to make them stop', and I just don't get it. In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones? The same with self-driving cars - peo…

I'm not sure it is really that big of a fear, but shooting at people is totally psychopathic. Random property damage happens WAY more often than random murder.

Shooting down a drone is like throwing a rock in a window or graffiti. In a lot of areas, those crimes are a huge problem.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#184

Post by gibsonje »

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…

Doesn't google do this same thing?...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#185

Post by MCRed »

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…

If I was lying, may Amazon's lawyers strike me down and take me to court! I would love to reveal my experiences there, and of course, the truth is an unbeatable defense. I certainly have more salacious tidbits than the Ellen Pao trial revealed. Including personal experiences with Jeff Bozo.

>Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.

Telling a lie about me to attempt to impeach my point is what's known as ad hominem.

>As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE.

FALSE. During my time there I had multiple managers (due to re-orgs.) and NOT ONE of them was a former SDE.

Not one of them was competent enough to manage programmers. None of them knew what a service oriented architecture was, or how version control worked (they thought of it as a backup), or how to write a simple program in ANY language. And this was true all the way between me and Bezos.

>The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon

FALSE. It is exactly the same, with managers having to lobby, and whole teams of people who are "out of favor" with an upper manager getting lower salary because of the higher level stack.

>I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid

You impeach yourself by admitting that Amazon uses stack ranking which directly contradicts this claim.

Amazon is a terrible place to work at-- in an extensive career, it was, by far, the worst job.

Not only because of the problems, but because the management doesn't give a damn, and is actually hostile to employees-- that's what makes it really bad.

All companies have problems. Amazon has fundamental disrespect for engineers.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#186

Post by mturmon »

nknighthb wrote: post #63
michaelt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear "drone delivery" I hear some PR guys spending $500 on a hobby drone, carrying a trivial weight a short distance within line-of-sight of a manual operator, then we don't hear any more about it. Textbook drone delivery: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/14/zookal-starts-world-first-d... Cake drone delivery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1020621... Pizza drone delivery: http://www.adweek.c…

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…

Ah, they hired Paul Viola. He's a major talent.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#187

Post by MCRed »

sanderjd wrote: post #111
LunaSea wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The he-said/she-said of these comments makes me think that nobody is actively distorting, but that it's just such a big company that different people can have wildly differing experiences.

There are people who are low level enough to maybe not have seen this stuff.

But I also saw stuff that, like that letter, I consider to be wrong. The latter refers to criminal actions-- I am not a lawyer so I can't say whether what the company did was illegal or not, but I certainly thought it was wrong.

One thing about that letter that rang true in my experience was that the company does not follow its own internal policies or handbook.

Amazon HR was dishonest to me, deceptive and engaged in what I consider to be fraud.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#188

Post by wyldfire »

grkvlt wrote: post #161
toyg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive. To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, wher…

> People will shoot them down for fun I hear this a lot, along with comments about self-driving cars being unusable because 'people will run in front of them to make them stop', and I just don't get it. In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones? The same with self-driving cars - peo…

> In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones?

I don't think it would be at all routine. But I can imagine trouble-making adolescents doing that (here in the US). Probably wouldn't be make-or-break for drones. But it would be an interesting challenge for Amazon -- how can we retrieve this equipment and how can we investigate its attack/distinguish from part failures?

Re: Amazon Home Services

#189

Post by MCRed »

delecti wrote: post #156
eropple wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the record, everything I said was true, and after calling me a liar, he effectively admitted it!

Re: Amazon Home Services

#190

Post by MCRed »

justrudd wrote: post #171
bederoso wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience, similar time there, three managers, none of them knew how to code, and their managers varied- one was decent, one was a DMV reject.

But when I say they couldn't code, I mean that literally-- for one example degree in criminal justice, no knowledge of software practices, etc. This isn't another way of saying they were "bad programmers". No bad programmers can make great managers.

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