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Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

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Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#91

Post by mkramlich »

ghshephard wrote: post #79
tomjen3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure it works as a filter - I personally wouldn't spend my time making a .doc resume since it would enable HR drones to "enhance" it. Yes that can also be done with a PDF, but it is difficult enough that they don't.

" personally wouldn't spend my time making a .doc resume since it would enable HR drones to "enhance" it." You don't think that filtering out people who have issues with the HR organization processing resume's isn't a "Filter?"

it's a filter. just not a filter for qualities I want to see in a potential employer, or, in potential co-workers. i want to see intelligence, flexibility, efficiency, substance, creativity, modernity, human-friendly systems and an emphasis on ROWE, not warm bodies in seats like clockwork, or conformity. Word? I mean, in a world where PDF and plain text exists? And non-MS/agnostic systems, and HTML? Seriously?

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#92

Post by derekp7 »

btilly wrote: post #34
flink wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never applied for a job at Amazon but I have done the same thing with other companies. When I was last looking for a job, I found a couple of interesting positions whose HR systems would only take resumes in MS Word. I closed the tab and kept searching. For me, it's a practical and ideological thing. My resume is written in LaTeX (with a plain text version) and unless I'm missing something, there is no good or e…

To convert LaTeX to word, use something like http://hyperlatex.sourceforge.net/ to convert it to HTML, and then rename it .doc. Word should be perfectly happy reading that. And a lot of places that say they only accept Word won't notice the difference. (I don't know about Amazon.)

Actually, a lot of the places that require Word format use a tool which extracts relevant information from the resume to automatically populate their database. For some reason those custom tools don't work with text documents (go figure).

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#93

Post by mkramlich »

czhiddy wrote: post #16

Interesting how AMZN jumps 5% after missing earnings, yet GOOG drops nearly 10% with nearly the exact same results (increased hiring and expenses resulting in lower than expected profit).

As a general rule, short term movements on Wall Street are "dumb" because there's a lot of emotion driving trading on that scale, plus lots of weird automated/hedge fund trading going on. To give just one example of something that probably contributes to noise: naive trading programs that see an uptick on "Hathaway" in the news streams, assume that's a signal indicating some new item about Buffet's company, so they buy up BH -- but in reality the spike was caused by a wave of news about the actress Anne Hathaway. I'm sure there's a lot of dumb/naive algorithms like that out there. Plus who knows how many pre-scheduled trades or triggered trades. In the short term, lots of dumb noise and froth. I think overall movements on Wall Street are the most meaningful and valid in the longer term, and across a large class of things.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#94

Post by btilly »

derekp7 wrote: post #92
btilly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To convert LaTeX to word, use something like http://hyperlatex.sourceforge.net/ to convert it to HTML, and then rename it .doc. Word should be perfectly happy reading that. And a lot of places that say they only accept Word won't notice the difference. (I don't know about Amazon.)

Actually, a lot of the places that require Word format use a tool which extracts relevant information from the resume to automatically populate their database. For some reason those custom tools don't work with text documents (go figure).

I didn't say it worked with all. But it works with a lot.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#95

Post by jmatthews »

neuroelectronic wrote: post #64
jmatthews wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just reading his run up regarding their distributed server technology it read to me like a brief ad for AppEngine. I'm thinking about all of the hardcore neuron work that went in to their infrastructure and how I'm getting a competing product for a song.

for liberal definitions of "competing" The only similar cloud services are from Microsoft and Google and they are about the same price, definitely not "a song" territory.

I meant that given your app works within the restrictions of GAE you get the benefit of a lot of brainpower from men with long beards.

Maybe the association was temporal as I'd just finished watching an IO presentation about how to scheme data for appengine where the detail was primarily the same as Bezos' first few paragraphs.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#96

Post by jacques_chester »

TWADDLE wrote: post #37

Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon. In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core business, they also have AWS, kindle, android app store. Who cares if their legacy codebase is 40 milllions lines of C++ and not your hip Ruby or LIPS nonsense. The truth is that they get work done. AWS is one of the best cloud computing system out there. Nothing e…

My understanding is that the original code for Amazon was written in hip Lisp nonsense with some ironic-retro C thrown in.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#97

Post by jontas »

daeken wrote: post #15
petercooper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have . That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.

I thought about going to Amazon when I decided to get out of the startup world about 6 months ago. I went through the standard application process, and promptly closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format -- rejected PDFs, HTML, and even plaintext. It may seem like a silly reason not to work somewhere, but I think that the hiring process says more about a company than just abou…

For what it's worth, their job site now says you paste your resume into a box: http://www.amazon.com/How-Apply-Help-Careers-Homepage/b/ref=...

I don't know about 6 months ago, perhaps their policy has changed.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#98

Post by aphexairlines »

pkteison wrote: post #12
jordanb wrote: post #5

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In f…

I've seen some negative stories about working at Amazon. I don't recall seeing anybody write that it's a great place to program. Anybody have any stories or links about the upside?

The upside is that the company has excellent developer tools and infrastructure (I mean aside from AWS), very accessible principal engineers, a huge amount of paying customers so your work has real impact, and it seems like most teams have autonomy to work and deliver in their own way. Within a week or two of joining I was given ownership of an important internal product while also getting up to speed on the main event (the retail website). The technical challenges are there for the taking.

I also mentioned some of this at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488980

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#99

Post by nitfol »

pkteison wrote: post #76
Splines wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, searches for computer equipment is generally frustrating. I've also seen sorts result in a large number of irrelevant outdated used items getting filtered to the top.[1] I'm willing to cut them slack since it's good enough, but look at Newegg to see how it should be done. It's not a completely fair comparison (since Newegg specializes in this), but they do it so much better.[2] [1] http://www.amazon.co…

Thanks, great example. It looks like they don't account for the importance of certain terms in tech searches well enough. Like they're far too willing to throw away the "16gb" part of "16gb sdhc" when sorting by price, and sorting by relevance shows you expensive stuff, so there is no good way to say "show me cheap stuff but I'm not kidding about the 16gb part".

Also note that sorting by price doesn't actually sort correctly. In this search, a $6.99 card comes before a $5.99 card (both with free super-saver shipping). This is so broken (and has been for so long) that I almost think it must be intentional somehow.

Re: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D

#100

Post by forensic »

mkramlich wrote: post #91
ghshephard wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" personally wouldn't spend my time making a .doc resume since it would enable HR drones to "enhance" it." You don't think that filtering out people who have issues with the HR organization processing resume's isn't a "Filter?"

it's a filter. just not a filter for qualities I want to see in a potential employer, or, in potential co-workers. i want to see intelligence, flexibility, efficiency, substance, creativity, modernity, human-friendly systems and an emphasis on ROWE, not warm bodies in seats like clockwork, or conformity. Word? I mean, in a world where PDF and plain text exists? And non-MS/agnostic systems, and HTML? Seriously?

A computer scientist against clockwork and conformity?

All technology is about making stuff work like clockwork. That's like.. what it's all about. This applies to human processes just as much as machine ones.

Conformity is one way to create good clockwork machines.

Your reasons strike me as childish. Word is still the best word processor by far. Personally I respect people who use Word because it means they're willing to use the best software despite it being associated with Microsoft. Word for Mac is about a billion times more sophisticated than Pages.

Anyway to each his own.

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