191–200 of 247 posts
The is certainly space for a "Uber/Airbnb for home services", but I am not sure Amazon will be it. What startups are in this space, and do they have any traction?
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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.
Sure it might make us on HN feel good that .com does not equal USA and we are the center of the world, but it would make little sense otherwise.
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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.
Politics was a huge factor. If a team worked really hard during the quarter and got a lot done, but hadn't shipped their feature yet, they risked all bering in the "underperforming" category, simply to allow a peer team to have more "over performers" to reward them-- for actually delivering or for sufficiently sucking off the appropriate boss (or not getting knives in your back.)
There were a lot of (metaphorical) blowjobs and knives in the back in that organization.
Which is what you have to have when ALL of the management is non-technical.
You can't have a meritocracy when the people assigning ratings are incapable of judging merit.
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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…
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…
Please respond to negativity on HN with less of it, not more. Otherwise the threads spiral into toxicity.
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…
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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…
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 moving to another team.
Even though the HR policy is that your manager can't block you from an internal transfer, that's not reality. Which means when you're wrongly assigned to a team with a bad manager or a bad fit, you better bounce quick, or you're stuck there until you leave the company.
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…
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…
> He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.
Etc.
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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…
When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.
Which is what I did.
This is also not one persons perspective, but a common perspective in Seattle, so common that I knew about it in 1996, repeatedly heard horror sorries for the next 10 years ,and still went to work there after hearing horror stories from other ex-employees. Yeah, they caught me at point where I was a bit desperate.
In seattle, the horribleness of working there is pretty widely known.
Not sure why its so shocking and unbelievable here on Hacker News.
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When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.
I'd say most people here are concerned about the engineers. The culture around the warehouses is pretty well understood, from my experience. Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors.…
One of the things that has since become a red flag for me is that Amazon is very cult like.