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Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be? I can personally point to two friends who

Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be? I can personally point to two friends who I consider top notch engineers and designers that have left Amazon because of its toxic culture. I'm sure I'm not the only with these anecdotal examples, we've all heard the stories. At the end of the day years of unbalanced work/life balance, overly aggressive management and frugal approach to everything makes for a weak argument for A players to stick around. Could this be an example of crumbling engineering standard at Amazon?

codeonfire 8y ago
In addition to the shit that is not politically correct to say, Amazon relies heavily on interns for production code and ops. Bezos has this view that the unskilled can get him 80% of what he wants and then a few top people can smooth out the rest. In reality the few top people never even come in contact with the kid that is trying to keep amazon.com running overnight. Successive waves of interns and SDE 1's fuck up the same shit over and over. Bezos is stupidly applying this same strategy at his space company.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  I always wonder how stupid people can accumulate $100Billion being stupid.
- Analog24 8y ago
  This is complete nonsense, at least in my org. Interns are given projects that are as far from production code as possible. I'm sure there are managers out there who have done this but it does not extrapolate to the entire company and it's ridiculous to think that it's a company wide practice to make interns responsible for anything that would affect customers.
- wiredone 8y ago
  This is complete BS. Interns are basically on a really well paid holiday and given random features that may/may not ever make it to production.
tills13 8y ago
Considering they cleared $2.6 billion on last year's Prime Day, and membership is up YOY, I'd say this comment is 100% knee-jerk/over analysing. Stuff breaks, things go wrong, planning for the worst sometimes isn't enough.
- chc 8y ago
  I don't see how "they sold a lot a year ago" and "membership is up YOY" is meant to dispute the idea that engineering talent is leaving. I agree we don't have enough evidence to say for sure, but those figures don't seem relevant.
- rezashirazian 8y ago
  My comment has nothing to do with Amazon's current financial success or growth. It's regarding their engineering team and their ability to recruit and retain top talent. It is not a binary state of absolute destitute and top notch brilliance, it's a trend that can move one way or another and will show itself in more frequent outages, poorly rolled out products, lazy design and etc. The plumping can keep on working for a few years even after it begins to erode. Historically there are many examples of this.
  - bhouston 8y ago
    Maybe but your evidence is annecdotal. Good engineers leave huge companies all the time but it is usually balanced by inflow. I guess we have no evidence of inflow as compared to outflow of good engineers.
    - rezashirazian 8y ago
      I didn't reach a conclusion, I presented a possible reason knowing very well that I don't have the evidence to back it. Hence why I said "could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be?" and not "The engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be."
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
deegles 8y ago
My gut feel is that they did everything right to prepare based on forecasts from last year but still got swamped by demand.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I saw the page reload multiple times when doing a search before finally dying...I can only imagine that means additional load generated by the initial triggering failure. Which in turn tells me they didn't test the failure case. Now, Amazon is a huge and complicated beast so I don't want to imply this was a "dumb" mistake, but (assuming I'm correct) it is a failure that risked making MORE failure, so it's not demand alone to blame.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I have Amazon Prime, and I had no idea that today was Prime day. Haven't seen any marketing for it, and nothing in email until this morning.
  - nbar1 8y ago
    The only marketing I've seen for it was the tape on my packages the last few weeks.
  - ricardonunez 8y ago
    It has been all over the place. Unless you don't visit Amazon on a regular bases, or deals websites. I don't even watch tv often and saw ad on it.
throwaway289355 8y ago
AWS employee and bar raiser here. >Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be? In many regards, yes. The bar had to be lowered to meet the demands of growth. We've also taken in a lot of hires from companies that have brought their culture and friends with them. The culture at Amazon is not what is was even 2 years ago. It is in many places day 2. No one also seems to notice that Amazon retail often suffers widespread issues like this. We can count on SEV1's happening during peak as things blow up badly. This has happened several years in a row, and sadly the themes are pretty much the same across all: forgot to scale (yes...really) or some stupid system bottleneck. It doesn't help that Amazon retail has a good amount of its workforce based in India and seemingly disconnected from the Seattle based leadership.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  what is a bar raiser? and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.
  - throwaway289355 8y ago
    >https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/recruitment/raising-the-bar-unconventional-interview-method-really-works https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/recruitment/raising-the-ba... I think Amazon has taken on an outsized image to many people that just isn't true. We have good engineers in many organizations, but we don't pay enough, have the right strategy, or take care of individuals well enough to lure the kind of great folks you find at other big tech companies. In many ways, Amazon is a retailer that does technology because it found a way to make money from it. The DNA is still MBAs/finance and retail.
    - deskamess 8y ago
      How much do you think the on-call contributes to engineers leaving? You would think support tools and support personnel could help to retain engineers.
convivialdingo 8y ago
Absolutely. The fact that this is ongoing hours later is pretty much a clear sign that there’s problems. I understand that it’s not always easily fixable. But honestly this looks pretty bad. Could be anything from bad code to a flakey cable. I got out of high volume websites - too much marketing, unpaid overtime, and horrible work-life balance.
sadamznintern 8y ago
>Could this be an example of crumbling engineering standard at Amazon? As someone that's been going through quite a bit of depression because Amazon was the best offer I got (as opposed to Google or Facebook because I'm still bad at coding interviews) I'm afraid this is the straw that's going to break the camel's back for me. This is exactly what I was afraid of and exactly what I have waiting for me when I join next week. There's no point anymore.
- throwaway080383 8y ago
  Chin up. You're probably in the top 5% of the country in income. If you're in Washington, feel free to tack on another 9% or so to your income in state taxes you don't have to pay.
  - 01100011 8y ago
    While it's nice to not have state income taxes to worry about, total tax burden isn't all that much different from any other state. The only time you really come out ahead is if you can live in WA and do all your shopping in OR.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      For high income a people like amazon engineers, WA is crazy low tax burden. CA income tax could only match WA sales tax of you spend 100% or probably more of your income on taxable items.
- in_cahoots 8y ago
  100% serious here: you should probably see a therapist. Life is so much more than your job, and your job is so much more than the brand name of your company. Having worked at a failing business and one of the companies you mentioned, I’m no happier at the latter than I was at the former. If you define yourself by the names on your resumé one day you’ll wake up and realize how much of life you’ve missed out on.
  - 8y ago
codeonfire 8y ago
From personal experience they hired lots of "people recently from the geographic location of India" gang-star managers who are full of their own shit. They wipe out anyone not Indian and execs love it because they want cheap H1B slaves. Surprise! they don't know shit, don't give a shit about US business, don't give a shit about American culture. Apparently don't give a shit about uptime.
- sctb 8y ago
  Please don't rant like this on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fjsolwmv 8y ago
No. Amazon has had outages on holiday shopping days throughout its history. Amazon has always been toxic and frugal, so obviously it didn't interfere with whatever mythical software quality it had in the past. And today's failures might be because past engineers built unstable unmaintainable systems and then ran away. And of course amazon is 10, 100, 1000 times larger tech system than it used to be.

codeonfire 8y ago

In addition to the shit that is not politically correct to say, Amazon relies heavily on interns for production code and ops. Bezos has this view that the unskilled can get him 80% of what he wants and then a few top people can smooth out the rest. In reality the few top people never even come in contact with the kid that is trying to keep amazon.com running overnight. Successive waves of interns and SDE 1's fuck up the same shit over and over. Bezos is stupidly applying this same strategy at his space company.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
I always wonder how stupid people can accumulate $100Billion being stupid.
Analog24 8y ago
This is complete nonsense, at least in my org. Interns are given projects that are as far from production code as possible. I'm sure there are managers out there who have done this but it does not extrapolate to the entire company and it's ridiculous to think that it's a company wide practice to make interns responsible for anything that would affect customers.
wiredone 8y ago
This is complete BS. Interns are basically on a really well paid holiday and given random features that may/may not ever make it to production.

tills13 8y ago

Considering they cleared $2.6 billion on last year's Prime Day, and membership is up YOY, I'd say this comment is 100% knee-jerk/over analysing. Stuff breaks, things go wrong, planning for the worst sometimes isn't enough.

chc 8y ago
I don't see how "they sold a lot a year ago" and "membership is up YOY" is meant to dispute the idea that engineering talent is leaving. I agree we don't have enough evidence to say for sure, but those figures don't seem relevant.
rezashirazian 8y ago
My comment has nothing to do with Amazon's current financial success or growth. It's regarding their engineering team and their ability to recruit and retain top talent. It is not a binary state of absolute destitute and top notch brilliance, it's a trend that can move one way or another and will show itself in more frequent outages, poorly rolled out products, lazy design and etc. The plumping can keep on working for a few years even after it begins to erode. Historically there are many examples of this.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Maybe but your evidence is annecdotal. Good engineers leave huge companies all the time but it is usually balanced by inflow. I guess we have no evidence of inflow as compared to outflow of good engineers.
  - rezashirazian 8y ago
    I didn't reach a conclusion, I presented a possible reason knowing very well that I don't have the evidence to back it. Hence why I said "could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be?" and not "The engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be."
HillaryBriss 8y ago

deegles 8y ago

My gut feel is that they did everything right to prepare based on forecasts from last year but still got swamped by demand.

ergothus 8y ago
I saw the page reload multiple times when doing a search before finally dying...I can only imagine that means additional load generated by the initial triggering failure. Which in turn tells me they didn't test the failure case. Now, Amazon is a huge and complicated beast so I don't want to imply this was a "dumb" mistake, but (assuming I'm correct) it is a failure that risked making MORE failure, so it's not demand alone to blame.
ams6110 8y ago
I have Amazon Prime, and I had no idea that today was Prime day. Haven't seen any marketing for it, and nothing in email until this morning.
- nbar1 8y ago
  The only marketing I've seen for it was the tape on my packages the last few weeks.
- ricardonunez 8y ago
  It has been all over the place. Unless you don't visit Amazon on a regular bases, or deals websites. I don't even watch tv often and saw ad on it.

throwaway289355 8y ago

AWS employee and bar raiser here. >Something no one has mentioned yet, could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be? In many regards, yes. The bar had to be lowered to meet the demands of growth. We've also taken in a lot of hires from companies that have brought their culture and friends with them. The culture at Amazon is not what is was even 2 years ago. It is in many places day 2. No one also seems to notice that Amazon retail often suffers widespread issues like this. We can count on SEV1's happening during peak as things blow up badly. This has happened several years in a row, and sadly the themes are pretty much the same across all: forgot to scale (yes...really) or some stupid system bottleneck. It doesn't help that Amazon retail has a good amount of its workforce based in India and seemingly disconnected from the Seattle based leadership.

nikofeyn 8y ago
what is a bar raiser? and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.
- throwaway289355 8y ago
  >https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/recruitment/raising-the-bar-unconventional-interview-method-really-works https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/recruitment/raising-the-ba... I think Amazon has taken on an outsized image to many people that just isn't true. We have good engineers in many organizations, but we don't pay enough, have the right strategy, or take care of individuals well enough to lure the kind of great folks you find at other big tech companies. In many ways, Amazon is a retailer that does technology because it found a way to make money from it. The DNA is still MBAs/finance and retail.
  - deskamess 8y ago
    How much do you think the on-call contributes to engineers leaving? You would think support tools and support personnel could help to retain engineers.

convivialdingo 8y ago

Absolutely. The fact that this is ongoing hours later is pretty much a clear sign that there’s problems. I understand that it’s not always easily fixable. But honestly this looks pretty bad. Could be anything from bad code to a flakey cable. I got out of high volume websites - too much marketing, unpaid overtime, and horrible work-life balance.

sadamznintern 8y ago

>Could this be an example of crumbling engineering standard at Amazon? As someone that's been going through quite a bit of depression because Amazon was the best offer I got (as opposed to Google or Facebook because I'm still bad at coding interviews) I'm afraid this is the straw that's going to break the camel's back for me. This is exactly what I was afraid of and exactly what I have waiting for me when I join next week. There's no point anymore.

throwaway080383 8y ago
Chin up. You're probably in the top 5% of the country in income. If you're in Washington, feel free to tack on another 9% or so to your income in state taxes you don't have to pay.
- 01100011 8y ago
  While it's nice to not have state income taxes to worry about, total tax burden isn't all that much different from any other state. The only time you really come out ahead is if you can live in WA and do all your shopping in OR.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    For high income a people like amazon engineers, WA is crazy low tax burden. CA income tax could only match WA sales tax of you spend 100% or probably more of your income on taxable items.
in_cahoots 8y ago
100% serious here: you should probably see a therapist. Life is so much more than your job, and your job is so much more than the brand name of your company. Having worked at a failing business and one of the companies you mentioned, I’m no happier at the latter than I was at the former. If you define yourself by the names on your resumé one day you’ll wake up and realize how much of life you’ve missed out on.
- 8y ago

codeonfire 8y ago

From personal experience they hired lots of "people recently from the geographic location of India" gang-star managers who are full of their own shit. They wipe out anyone not Indian and execs love it because they want cheap H1B slaves. Surprise! they don't know shit, don't give a shit about US business, don't give a shit about American culture. Apparently don't give a shit about uptime.

sctb 8y ago
Please don't rant like this on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fjsolwmv 8y ago

No. Amazon has had outages on holiday shopping days throughout its history. Amazon has always been toxic and frugal, so obviously it didn't interfere with whatever mythical software quality it had in the past. And today's failures might be because past engineers built unstable unmaintainable systems and then ran away. And of course amazon is 10, 100, 1000 times larger tech system than it used to be.