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Despite all the complaints and open letters about Amazon's horrible work culture and bad organization, they seemed to be building great products at an amazing p

Despite all the complaints and open letters about Amazon's horrible work culture and bad organization, they seemed to be building great products at an amazing pace. I read somewhere that AWS deployed 1000 new features to production every week. Whatever they're doing, it seems to be working. My only complaint is that most of their UI interfaces feel like Web 1.0

coldtea 10y ago
I'd rather they had a better work culture and deployed less than "1000 new features every week", in the same way I don't care for cheap sneakers made in sweatshops.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  That's for their employees to worry about. They're not helpless - they're software developers with high demand.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    People get into abusive contracts and stay with them for all shorts of reasons. Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. They are physically able to go to the police, break the relationship, fight back, etc, but human needs and psychology are not black and white. And of course just because they decided to "put up with it" or the extra compensation makes it justified for them, doesn't mean the abuse isn't there. If someone gives a huge tip, it doesn't mean it's OK for them to mistreat the waiter. It just makes them more of a jerk.
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      >Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. Comparing Amazon employees to battered spouses is a stretch. Some might even say it's ignorant.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        All metaphors are a stretch. If they were absolutely analogous to the original there wouldn't be metaphors in the first place. Something doesn't have to be of equal value or importance to the thing its a metaphor for, just to convey the mechanics of the thing. It doesn't even have to convey the full thing, just the part the metaphor is intended for. In other words, one can use e.g. the Cold War as a metaphor for some office turf situation, even if the Cold War has millions of victims in proxy wars and could potentially have meant the end of the world, whereas office politics are much more inconsequential.
    - dismantlethesun 10y ago
      Does Amazon have contracts that tie people to their jobs? Can't people simply leave at will? > Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. This is a good comparison actually. Many people continue to work for an employer long after the good times have passed, because they feel loyalty towards them or don't want to admit to making a poor decision in the past, or there is social stigma against leaving. That said... Amazon is well reknowned for having poor workplace practices, so anyone joining them today should be going in with their eyes wide open, and stigma against leaving Amazon ought to be widely lowered.
      - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        > Can't people simply leave at will? Im actually not sure how this interacts with visas -- can visa employees freely leave without having to leave the country as well? It's anecdata, but when I interviewed with Amazon, not a single person born in the US interviewed me. (Which seems suspicious, that none of 7 people were from the US.) I've suspected that tech companies use visas to permit such toxic practices because foreign workers don't have the same negotiating position.
- deanCommie 10y ago
  Perhaps it suggests that the rumors of horrible work culture have been greatly exaggerated.
  - amzn-throw 10y ago
    They are.
- Kiro 10y ago
  And I am a bad human being for caring more about the features than their work culture?
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Not a bad one, just a selfish one.
sapeien 10y ago
That makes Web 1.0 sound bad. AWS seems to be using Angular and is full of UI quirks and bugs that would have been impossible without JS. HTML forms work predictably, reliably, and with a high degree of affordance.
- weddpros 10y ago
  until you hit "back"
  - jalfresi 10y ago
    Oh god this. And the inconsistent ability to ctrl-click a link in a new tab (works in EC2, not in RDS for example)
jaboutboul 10y ago
AWS is a very specific business unit within the company and from my friends that work there seems to have a very different culture than Amazon (retail) proper. Yes their dev/release cycles are quite impressive.
mlangdon 10y ago
Slightly away from topic, but my new burn is "this is so web 2.0." Because that was like 10 years ago. Personally, I think AWS feels pretty "now" with UX only a developer could love (said as a sometime developer).
ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
> most of their UI interfaces feel like Web 1.0 Which makes me certainly wonder about what assumptions I am making about the general computing public that are obviously false. I assume that Amazon's pages are probably some of the most optimized and A/B tested in the world. If their interfaces feel sooo Web 1.0, I can only imagine it is like that because of extensive and exhaustive testing and metrics analysis. What lessons can this teach to the rest of us, who don't have the infrastructure or user-base to do the kind of testing that they do?
- dx034 10y ago
  I think Amazon.com is heavily tested, not so sure about AWS. I'm happy that it's Web 1.0 (i.e. fast), but it often seems as new functions were just added to existing design. Some pages might need reorganization/redesign to make them a bit less complicated to use. The problem is that people often associate a redesign with switching to SPA. Which I really hope they won't do.
  - rockostrich 10y ago
    Fast? I guess the initial render for everything on the AWS console is fast and the new landing page is much nicer to look at, but many of the APIs take forever and all of the product specific pages still have a Web 1.0 UI.
    - dx034 10y ago
      Then we're talking about different pages. The ones that load forever are not Web 1.0 for me. Web 1.0 is pure HTML with little JavaScript. They load fast. What takes forever are the new, fancy JS pages, which are probably Web 3.0 (or where ever we are now). It's still faster than most SPAs, just very complicated.
- aphextron 10y ago
  >What lessons can this teach to the rest of us, who don't have the infrastructure or user-base to do the kind of testing that they do? Probably a lot. I've worked with embarrassingly bad looking websites that were making millions of dollars in revenue, only to see it drop off a cliff after a "modern" redesign. The truth is that the general public sees a much different thing as they browse the web than we do. Things like legibility, simplicity, and speed are far more important than advanced features.
hacker_9 10y ago
You could say this about a lot of businesses; AAA game companies, supermarkets etc all can have horrible work culture. But when you are spending millions, and can hire as many people as you want, and work them hard, results will come.
dismantlethesun 10y ago
Amazon's store frontend interfaces are A/B tested. Their backend stuff for developers---not so much. The look and feel of the Amazon store looks 'web 1.0' because it has high information density, and less white space. Current web fashion is to have minimalist design with lots of white space, but that fashion not UX. As a UX example, Amazon's store follows pretty standard practices---tables for tabular data, cards for related items that will be skimmed, vertical scrolling to support long item lists without changing the layout on browser resolution, consistent sizing/spacing/coloring for headers, control locality so clicking a button changes information near by it. It does all of the things you'd expect a regular web app to do, but sprays it over a long-form page instead of burying it in tabs increasing scroll distance via whitespace. Where Amazon fails is niches. Their interface is generalist, so they don't have great UX for buying clothes, or buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that).
- philfrasty 10y ago
  „...because it has high information density...“ +1!! If you look at the Sellercentral backend (for sellers on Amazon) it is breathtaking what kind of Analytics, inventory reports, etc you can generate. Would love to have this kind of level of information in an external (own) ecommerce-shop/system.
- joshuak 10y ago
  Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow. A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope. Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior. Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or scrolling a pages is actually less difficult then visually searching a cluttered information scape. Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion. It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they already won the market long ago.
josh_carterPDX 10y ago
Not only that, but how can anyone keep up with their new feature releases to get any real value? Seems like a shotgun approach to product development.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  No one company has to. Much of their features come out from requests of existing customers; they know that ~someone~ cares about it, because someone who is already giving them money has asked for it. As they add those, other people will also use it, as needed. They expand the feature set for anyone evaluating them, as well as help lock in existing customers.

coldtea 10y ago

I'd rather they had a better work culture and deployed less than "1000 new features every week", in the same way I don't care for cheap sneakers made in sweatshops.

MichaelBurge 10y ago
That's for their employees to worry about. They're not helpless - they're software developers with high demand.
- coldtea 10y ago
  People get into abusive contracts and stay with them for all shorts of reasons. Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. They are physically able to go to the police, break the relationship, fight back, etc, but human needs and psychology are not black and white. And of course just because they decided to "put up with it" or the extra compensation makes it justified for them, doesn't mean the abuse isn't there. If someone gives a huge tip, it doesn't mean it's OK for them to mistreat the waiter. It just makes them more of a jerk.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. Comparing Amazon employees to battered spouses is a stretch. Some might even say it's ignorant.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      All metaphors are a stretch. If they were absolutely analogous to the original there wouldn't be metaphors in the first place. Something doesn't have to be of equal value or importance to the thing its a metaphor for, just to convey the mechanics of the thing. It doesn't even have to convey the full thing, just the part the metaphor is intended for. In other words, one can use e.g. the Cold War as a metaphor for some office turf situation, even if the Cold War has millions of victims in proxy wars and could potentially have meant the end of the world, whereas office politics are much more inconsequential.
  - dismantlethesun 10y ago
    Does Amazon have contracts that tie people to their jobs? Can't people simply leave at will? > Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. This is a good comparison actually. Many people continue to work for an employer long after the good times have passed, because they feel loyalty towards them or don't want to admit to making a poor decision in the past, or there is social stigma against leaving. That said... Amazon is well reknowned for having poor workplace practices, so anyone joining them today should be going in with their eyes wide open, and stigma against leaving Amazon ought to be widely lowered.
    - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
      > Can't people simply leave at will? Im actually not sure how this interacts with visas -- can visa employees freely leave without having to leave the country as well? It's anecdata, but when I interviewed with Amazon, not a single person born in the US interviewed me. (Which seems suspicious, that none of 7 people were from the US.) I've suspected that tech companies use visas to permit such toxic practices because foreign workers don't have the same negotiating position.
deanCommie 10y ago
Perhaps it suggests that the rumors of horrible work culture have been greatly exaggerated.
- amzn-throw 10y ago
  They are.
Kiro 10y ago
And I am a bad human being for caring more about the features than their work culture?
- dublinben 10y ago
  Not a bad one, just a selfish one.

sapeien 10y ago

That makes Web 1.0 sound bad. AWS seems to be using Angular and is full of UI quirks and bugs that would have been impossible without JS. HTML forms work predictably, reliably, and with a high degree of affordance.

weddpros 10y ago
until you hit "back"
- jalfresi 10y ago
  Oh god this. And the inconsistent ability to ctrl-click a link in a new tab (works in EC2, not in RDS for example)

jaboutboul 10y ago

AWS is a very specific business unit within the company and from my friends that work there seems to have a very different culture than Amazon (retail) proper. Yes their dev/release cycles are quite impressive.

mlangdon 10y ago

Slightly away from topic, but my new burn is "this is so web 2.0." Because that was like 10 years ago. Personally, I think AWS feels pretty "now" with UX only a developer could love (said as a sometime developer).

ChicagoBoy11 10y ago

> most of their UI interfaces feel like Web 1.0 Which makes me certainly wonder about what assumptions I am making about the general computing public that are obviously false. I assume that Amazon's pages are probably some of the most optimized and A/B tested in the world. If their interfaces feel sooo Web 1.0, I can only imagine it is like that because of extensive and exhaustive testing and metrics analysis. What lessons can this teach to the rest of us, who don't have the infrastructure or user-base to do the kind of testing that they do?

dx034 10y ago
I think Amazon.com is heavily tested, not so sure about AWS. I'm happy that it's Web 1.0 (i.e. fast), but it often seems as new functions were just added to existing design. Some pages might need reorganization/redesign to make them a bit less complicated to use. The problem is that people often associate a redesign with switching to SPA. Which I really hope they won't do.
- rockostrich 10y ago
  Fast? I guess the initial render for everything on the AWS console is fast and the new landing page is much nicer to look at, but many of the APIs take forever and all of the product specific pages still have a Web 1.0 UI.
  - dx034 10y ago
    Then we're talking about different pages. The ones that load forever are not Web 1.0 for me. Web 1.0 is pure HTML with little JavaScript. They load fast. What takes forever are the new, fancy JS pages, which are probably Web 3.0 (or where ever we are now). It's still faster than most SPAs, just very complicated.
aphextron 10y ago
>What lessons can this teach to the rest of us, who don't have the infrastructure or user-base to do the kind of testing that they do? Probably a lot. I've worked with embarrassingly bad looking websites that were making millions of dollars in revenue, only to see it drop off a cliff after a "modern" redesign. The truth is that the general public sees a much different thing as they browse the web than we do. Things like legibility, simplicity, and speed are far more important than advanced features.

hacker_9 10y ago

You could say this about a lot of businesses; AAA game companies, supermarkets etc all can have horrible work culture. But when you are spending millions, and can hire as many people as you want, and work them hard, results will come.

dismantlethesun 10y ago

Amazon's store frontend interfaces are A/B tested. Their backend stuff for developers---not so much. The look and feel of the Amazon store looks 'web 1.0' because it has high information density, and less white space. Current web fashion is to have minimalist design with lots of white space, but that fashion not UX. As a UX example, Amazon's store follows pretty standard practices---tables for tabular data, cards for related items that will be skimmed, vertical scrolling to support long item lists without changing the layout on browser resolution, consistent sizing/spacing/coloring for headers, control locality so clicking a button changes information near by it. It does all of the things you'd expect a regular web app to do, but sprays it over a long-form page instead of burying it in tabs increasing scroll distance via whitespace. Where Amazon fails is niches. Their interface is generalist, so they don't have great UX for buying clothes, or buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that).

philfrasty 10y ago
„...because it has high information density...“ +1!! If you look at the Sellercentral backend (for sellers on Amazon) it is breathtaking what kind of Analytics, inventory reports, etc you can generate. Would love to have this kind of level of information in an external (own) ecommerce-shop/system.
joshuak 10y ago
Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow. A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope. Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior. Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or scrolling a pages is actually less difficult then visually searching a cluttered information scape. Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion. It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they already won the market long ago.

josh_carterPDX 10y ago

Not only that, but how can anyone keep up with their new feature releases to get any real value? Seems like a shotgun approach to product development.

lostcolony 10y ago
No one company has to. Much of their features come out from requests of existing customers; they know that ~someone~ cares about it, because someone who is already giving them money has asked for it. As they add those, other people will also use it, as needed. They expand the feature set for anyone evaluating them, as well as help lock in existing customers.