I used to think that i was only few of those who had bad experience with Amazon, but whoa there many more out there who had bad experience. Couple of points i want to put here:
1. Amazon.com was not fully migrated to AWS till 2009-2010 for sure, though the migration was on going during that time only.
2. Agree with nirvana about getting page late night and work on fixing bug (Also even on Friday night and on many weekends)
3. Also one more thing which i want to point out here is: developers are going on oncall duties every now and then for 24X7 and 7 days a week including Saturday and Sundays. And you are not getting any benefit/compensatory day off on weekdays. (I heard yahoo pays their employees extra for being oncall)
Steve's Google Platform rant
211–220 of 418 posts
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#212No mention of Android. I know it was an acquisition, but Google built it out into a platform. Yes, it has flaws, but overall I would consider it a success.
His point wasn't that Google has no platforms, he specifically mentions a few groups in Google that do get it right and anybody that has used the gdata APIs for those products would agree that they really are quite nice to use as a third party developer when compared to a typical web API.
His point was that there shouldn't be so much variation on this from team to team and they should strive to make these platform services a cultural core part of the company.
I totally agree with his point, though I'm coming from the outsider perspective. I was really jazzed to hear they finally released an API for Google+ and then crushed to realize it was completely worthless for almost any task. They've recently released an updated API, adding in some very basic search stuff.. but the API is still worthless. Hopefully within a year or so they'll have an API that isn't completely worthless, but it would have been nice if they had one from the start and if they internalized the API culture Steve is talking about, this would have been a no-brainer because the API would be an integral part of the service from top to bottom instead of something being slowly bolted on later.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
HR is not there for you. HR is there for the company. Never forget that.
The HR people in my company help me all the time. It's a shame that so many workplaces are so adversarial.
It depends on what you want, maybe they help you in some cases because it costs nothing, or doing so does not touch a "live wire" of corporate policy or government regulation.
But for other matters, HR does pursue their own agenda, not yours. It's important to remember.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#214When I worked at Myspace, there was one (small) team dedicated to creating and maintaining internal services. The platform was called "slayer," short for service layer. It was built very well, for the most part. All the documentation and calls were in one place. And the few teams who used it built cool products (including my own) that leveraged data from a wide variety of services.
I think the simple reason that our products were better was because we could easily see all the data sources available to us every time we checked the documentation to do some simple things (say, retrieving a user's data). We can get friends data from here, music data from here, analytics from there. And what do you know, putting all that data into one place can make a cool product or feature. Without that, you spend so much time worrying about what your own product and team is doing that you forget about working together.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#215Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…
Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge left centuries ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in. You should base your decision on your internship.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Disgruntled" is a straight up ad hominem attack that doesn't address whether or not what the person says is true or not.
"grouchy, testy, sullen, grumpy, dissatisfied." All of the above, and I really don't see the ad hominem in there. It's just a description of a state of mind with respect to another entity.
But the real world usage of disgruntled is as a marker for "This person is biased against the company, so any fair-minded person should discount what they have to say."
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#217It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
Thank you for rescuing this. It has great engineering wisdom and historical value.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#218It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture. But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platf…
It's not that. The procedure for open-sourcing Google-owned code is very easy: you e-mail Chris DiBona and he almost always says yes. There've been a bunch of major pieces of the Google infrastructure open-sourced (eg. cTemplate, Closure, Protocol Buffers, Guice).
The problem is really technical. Because of the open codebase and "edit anything" culture, basically every piece of infrastructure at Google, unless it was designed at the start for open-sourcing, has dependencies on every other piece of infrastructure. Untangling them takes far more time than you could 20% on. That's why you don't see more open-source platforms from Google.
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#219No mention of Android. I know it was an acquisition, but Google built it out into a platform. Yes, it has flaws, but overall I would consider it a success.
Android in itself is a successful mobile operating system and has a great install base.
However, I will not call it successful in context of the article above. Android as an operating system has not done anything to drive people to use Google's other (paid?) services - which is what you aim from a platform. You build your company's other products around it - like what Apple does by creating their own paid iOS apps to an extent. There have been numerous articles where people speculate if Chrome or Android is Google's future with Chrome coming out ahead all the time.
The fact that vendors and manufacturers put in their own layers of UI and apps etc. on top of Android makes it Google's platform even less. Oh, and I have not touched Kindle Fire as yet!
The fact there is in fact a debate about what should be the flagship platform (Chrome vs Android) for your company is not a good sign.
Lastly, what's the deal with Android not having Chrome as it's browser?
Re: Steve's Google Platform rant
#220It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
Steve and I overlapped at Google and I've always felt his missives were pretty clear and actionable. (unlike some which were simply 'this sucks') That this one made it outside the 'plex is probably a mistake, I hope he doesn't pay to high a price for that.
Of course there is the risk that he might get something changed inside of Google (I'm thinking unlikely) it would be a pretty amazing thing if the Google infrastructure was available as a platform (and no AppEngine does not count)