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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#401

Post by bluedanieru »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #283
Jun8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would call that very dangerous and very likely a premature optimization. Nobody cares you are a platform until they use your product, and if you spend all your time building a platform, there will be no product to use. The path requires far more finese than "always create a platform". You need to balance over-engineering with the ability to re-evaluate previous decisions. I agree Google has wandered far off this pa…

This applies to startups, less so to more mature companies who can and will throw more resources behind a project. After the prototyping phase, once you're reasonably sure of the direction you're going to go in, it isn't a bad idea to keep extensibility in mind from the start. It's more like premature architecting, if anything, than premature optimization, which is much less offensive (and not even necessarily bad).

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#402

Post by Foozle »

nirvana wrote: post #84
potatolicious wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream o…

I still periodically try out some of the regression tests that I'd done back when I worked there... there are bugs that have been in the site for about 4 years now. I think when my team was reduced by %90 from people leaving, they just disbanded it and nobodies doing that work now. Certainly the major initiatives haven't moved forward. I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he was a hedge fund gu…

> I don't think Bezos has a technical background

"Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering"

[http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/jeffbezos.html]

John Doerr (big-time VC) was at some of Amazon's early off-site meetings and he would always talk about how gnarly it was "inside the sausage factory". Meaning that when you knew what was really going on inside a company, nobody would want to work there.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#403

Post by heathkit »

nirvana wrote: post #7

I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…

Whenever people ask me if they should work at Amazon, I always say maybe in AWS, but never in anything to do with the retail website. I'm glad I did it, I certainly learned a great deal, but whenever a recruiter from Amazon calls these days I just laugh in their face.

Also, when I left two years ago they weren't using AWS for anything internally. S3 got a lot of use, but anything considered essential to keeping the site up had to run on real hardware.

That first month after I quit, it was such an amazing feeling not to have to go on call. I agree, never take a pager unless it's an essential part of your job.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#404

Post by heathkit »

revorad wrote: post #52
nirvana wrote: post #7

I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…

I'm really shocked to read that (and the OP's rant about Amazon). Of course, I've never had a corporate job. It amazes me that Amazon managed to be so successful, despite treating their employees so badly.

My first job was at a company that I'd say was much, much worse than Amazon. Smaller, no real engineering practices, and they'd just chew through developers paying them as little as possible. Yet they made money!

I was migrating a legacy system to a new platform and we got a call from an irate customer. Apparently, he had just paid us last week but now his account was shut off. The odd thing was, no one I talked to even knew what product he was talking about, or what website he was on. I checked with our payments person, and he had sent us a check, but no one knew what it was for! Eventually I tracked it down to some legacy discontinued product that had been handed off between three successive engineers who left the company, then forgotten.

You don't have to treat your employees well, or even make a good product, to be successful. You just have to get people to give you money.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#405

Post by TruthPrevails »

henrikschroder wrote: post #393
TruthPrevails wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite comforting :)

But remember to get out if you end up in a crap group. Learn what you can, but remember to get out before you develop Stockholm syndrome.

Yes. It has happened to me once already.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#406

Post by metageek »

o1iver wrote: post #92
nirvana wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortu…

I think you are very right about the customer support thing. That is the one reason why I spend hundreds of dollars a year at Amazon. From the customer perspective (the only I have) you feel like a god. They nailed that one on the head. Example: My girlfriend sat on my Kindle and broke it. I called and said that it was broken. Without any questions they just offered to send me a new one for free! After something like…

"Sure, we'll give you a new razor," said the bladesmith...

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#407

Post by metageek »

potatolicious wrote: post #71
bambax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? If those horror stories are true (and we have no reason to doubt they are), it kinda shows that the way you treat your employees doesn't really matter to your success. It certainly matters a lot to them; it matters from a moral point of view; but from a practical point of view the only individuals whose happiness matters are the customers. Of course, if your employees are so…

On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream o…

>Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that.

Maybe this explains why I've been contacted by Amazon recruiters three times over the past three years...

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#408

Post by yonasb »

deltaqueue wrote: post #394
yonasb wrote: post #238

The fact that he didn't mean to post this is proof enough that G+ sucks. And he's spot on about everything he said. Google doesn't get platforms at all. Look what happened to Blogger, arguably their most successful platform (which they didn't even build).

Is it really proof? I have used G+ only a handful of times, but posting has been incredibly simple -- to classify who should see your post you click in a box and select the groups who should have access to it. One of them is "Public." I'm struggling to see how someone intelligent enough to work at Google could not figure this out. Perhaps it was just an error caused by posting too quickly, or it wasn't an error at al…

He was probably tired and didn't see what he was doing. I was joking about that part. But it does suck

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#409

Post by EmployedRussian »

bmj wrote: post #106
johnyzee wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...

Out of curiosity, is there much of a start-up culture there? If so, do founders (and first employees) adhere to the same guidelines? At least here in the U.S., founding/working at a start-up basically assumes long-ish hours.

Related: http://steveblank.com/2011/10/10/nokia-as-%E2%80%9Che-who-mu...

"Nanny-Culture, Lack of Risk Taking, Not Sharing What makes Finland such a wonderful place to live and raise a family may ultimately be what kills it as a startup hub."

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#410

Post by CamperBob »

bronson wrote: post #291
chernevik wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _hope_ I would I told my boss to check his email. Then I'd send him, cc: Bezos, a copy of the email from two months ago. I'd note that I'd done _my_ job, and that I wouldn't be _told_ to do someone else's, for free. If this meant I wasn't their kind of employee then they weren't my kind of employer. I don't know that I'd actually have the stones for it. But that would be the right choice. I imagine you'd agree, bet…

Any time you make your boss look like a chump, you lose.

Unless you do so by making yourself look good to his boss.
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