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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

benadam.me

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#3

Post by jsiaajdsdaa »

erehweb wrote: post #2

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

Business moves at the speed of now.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#4

Post by kentonv »

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it.

EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird.

EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben's. Wow. We'll... get on that. Sorry.

FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#5

Post by lloydatkinson »

erehweb wrote: post #2

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

And also considering how much in house software development there is...

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#6

Post by tyingq »

erehweb wrote: post #2

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

Interesting, since they have Honeycode..."Looks like a spreadsheet, works like a database"

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#7

Post by Waterluvian »

erehweb wrote: post #2

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

Formatting is a very very distant minor gripe compared to what I think is the main reason this is a problem: versioning.

That being said, if it works, it works.

If it doesn't work, make a case for why and develop a _holistic_ understanding of the costs and benefits of changing the current process. Maybe you can change it, or maybe you learn why it doesn't change.

If it works, but it offends your sensibilities, perhaps this is an opportunity for self-growth.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#9

Post by dymk »

kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

The page presents as an almost pure black background, and almost 100% white text to me - about as high-contrast as you can get. Maybe this is a light/dark mode issue?
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