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Amazon Academy India

academy.amazon.in

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Re: Amazon Academy India

#31

Post by covfefeblack »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #22
disown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.

Definitely agree, for a country with close to 2B population, it is absurd how their education system is divided into "a couple exceptional schools and the rest are really bad"

As an Indian who didn't make it into the IITs (and instead attended a different school)"The rest are really bad" isn't entirely accurate: - Facilities aren't that much worse than the IITs - Student quality varies - there's smart/motivated and dumb/demotivated/burnt-out kids - unlike the IITs that has a much higher quality bar - but you have both kinds - Faculty is the real difference.. since faculty in India (esp Engineering) isn't geared to research the quality can really vary wildly - Basically - if you're great at what you do - academics isn't a great track in India unlike the US

Re: Amazon Academy India

#32

Post by ffpip »

finnh wrote: post #28
ffpip wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Byjus is irrelevant in the IIT cottage industry. They are newer, and only online. And no company can convince Indian parents that online is better that 8am-8pm classroom coaching.

Does "no company" include Amazon? I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen the varied abilities of their elementary school teachers makes me think a top-flight online course could do much better than some of the actual people working at their school. There's no question the best teachers will outperform the best online content. But what are your odds of hiring the best teachers?

> Does "no company" include Amazon?

Yes.

> I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen...

No. Trust me. You will regret putting your child(ren) through online education. It sucks. I've tried it partially for 2 years. My friend is doing it now, preparing for JEE.

Preparing for JEE is not easy. I had hopes of getting in after getting a good score in the 1st Mains attempt, but just gave up during covid lockdown.

Social interaction is very very important.

Just trust me. I have nothing else to say. Not really interested in going through my 2 year ordeal in this comment.

Don't put your child in online edu in India. especially not JEE prep

You obviously aren't an average Indian parent (uses HN). So you might choose online for your kid. I'm just warning you.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#33

Post by dreamer7 »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #22
disown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.

Definitely agree, for a country with close to 2B population, it is absurd how their education system is divided into "a couple exceptional schools and the rest are really bad"

That's a strange way to put it. More accurate is - "a handful of exceptional schools, plenty of good ones and plenty of bad ones".

Re: Amazon Academy India

#34

Post by thaumasiotes »

disown wrote: post #18
gooftop wrote: post #7

Whoa.. talk about disrupting the IIT-prep cottage industry! Of course, I haven't seen the details of whether it's an effective tool or not, but as a free service that can only improve and scale over time .. should be a gamechanger. (For those outside India who are not aware of the exam that the academy is targeted at, its for admission to a collection of premier Engineering schools in the country. The exam is taken b…

> The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.

> Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.

The acceptance rate is not a "real" metric in the way that, say, the acceleration due to gravity is a quantity you can measure. Harvard and MIT do not have acceptance rates near 5%. They have an admission quota. If fewer people apply, more of those people are accepted. If more people apply, fewer of those people are accepted.

The reason for high acceptance numbers is that people perceive they are not Harvard/MIT material, and act on that knowledge by not applying to Harvard/MIT. Applicants need to clear a threshold well above the 95th percentile; the selectivity number is an illusion.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#35

Post by hm8 »

abhinavsharma wrote: post #3

As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is: 1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time. 2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.

I hope that, in addition to, improving their recruiting funnel and brand value; this effort serves to improve diversity in tech. We have talked about tech companies throwing their hands in the air to encourage college admissions rate from under-represented classes. Hopefully, this move to go down the funnel leads to that improvement!

Re: Amazon Academy India

#36

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

asdfasdpljtl wrote: post #8
blackbear_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So essentially... Cheap workers?

You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?

No they are not. The average job profile might be a bit lower but FAANG has plenty of high paying job opportunities in India.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#37

Post by amzwazy »

adi2907 wrote: post #12

Have always marvelled at Amazon’s ability to do local Innovation at scale. Here is a behemoth for whom India is 10 percent of global revenue, yet launch a service which has nothing to do with their core e-commerce and cloud functions. Is it to get users, hiring tool or make more money. Will be interesting to learn the culture which facilities such decision making - any other large company would have shot down such a…

They have a very flat / horizontal management structure for such a large company. Usually for an IC it goes:

You Usually a manager runs a 2-10 person team who they advocate for, and a few PMs interact with the teams that work on the projects they oversee. The PMs are sort of like sales in a traditional company, customer-facing roles who prioritize and occasionally promise features.

There are usually enough VPs that you can meet with one if you have an idea that your peers like, and the support of a VP seems to be enough to let a small team work on a tangent for a year or two.

It sounds a lot like how Google develops new products, because it's surprisingly easy to turn a working proof-of-concept into a public-facing product or service. So why don't they suffer from the product-killing disease that plagues Google?

I don't know, but I have a couple ideas:

* Amazon throws people and money at things that work. Products like Lambda and Alexa used to be small upstarts with modest expectations, but when they sold well, the company invested heavily in them.

* Amazon promotes people based on peer feedback and manager recommendations. It's an easy system to game, and there's a bit of graft as teams defend likeable underperformers since they stopped leaning so heavily on "rank-and-yank" performance reviews. But it also means that you can get promoted for maintenance, like "X prepared our retail service for holiday traffic, and we didn't lose millions in sales when it didn't crash."

I'm not sure how applicable their management structure is to most organizations, though. They can tolerate massive loss-leaders because they have a couple of money printers, and they re-invest most of that money in the company rather than sitting on it or paying it out in dividends. People tend to like working there if they can cope with a bit of stress, and I saw as many people leave the company as I saw take internal transfers during my time there, so "tribal knowledge" also fades more slowly despite the churn.

Re: Amazon Academy India

#38

Post by bergstromm466 »

Yes, educating/training workers in a Global South country that has already been heavily underdeveloped, in order to get cheap labor -- what an original formula.

If you don't see something, answer me this: why don't they do anything like this in the US?

Re: Amazon Academy India

#39

Post by bergstromm466 »

disown wrote: post #20

I wonder if this is just a sneaky way of finding potential employees by amazon. Have millions of people ( some of the brightest in the country ) take tests, gather their data, run that data through an algorithm and offer jobs to those selected by the algorithm.

I say -- bingo

Re: Amazon Academy India

#40

Post by duxup »

asdfasdpljtl wrote: post #8
blackbear_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So essentially... Cheap workers?

You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?

They are?

I haven't worked for FAANG but I've certainly seen a lot of India tech jobs hired by American companies that I wouldn't consider "low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with".

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