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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 ma
by 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 agowhat 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 agoHow much do you think the on-call contributes to engineers leaving? You would think support tools and support personnel could help to retain engineers.
- jhall1468 8y agoNo, bad design and refusal to manage technical debt is the issue. Oncall only matters in some orgs and even then only matters where the tech debt is totally out of control. Bottom line is Amazon is a product culture not an engineering culture and that makes it really easy to leave for Google or unicorns that really appreciate tech debt tradeoffs.
- chronid 8y agoWho cares about retaining those support/ops engineers you shit on because you don't want to own the crap you write, right? :)
- xigency 8y agoThis bar raiser thing sounds like normal hiring practice in my work experience.
- nojvek 8y agoThe thing that baffles me is the industry perception is that Amazon has subpar engineering but Amazon right now is 2nd after Apple for Marketcap, so they must be doing something right. I love the Amazon customer service. They’ve managed to crack a difficult problem and execute enough that other Giants haven’t come close to it yet. GCP and Azure tail AWS by quite a bit. Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now. So Amazon can do a lot of things wrong, but I’d have to say they get the important parts right.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago> Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now. Not even particularly close. Amazon doesn't even have a majority of online sales, although it's getting close. They seem like a much bigger force than they are because of growth. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...
- pas 8y agoThey are big, because they invested every penny they made into getting big. And those pennies are converted through human misery in "fulfillment centers". (And AWS on-call is not that fancy either for engineers, though the two are almost incomparable.) They got some parts right, some parts awfully wrong, and some are just irrelevant now. They make money, they are cheap + convenient, and that usually what people focus on. They are not sophisticated, they are not great designers, etc.
- vadym909 8y agoA bar raiser is typically someone in the interview loop for a candidate that is not from the same team and therefore more objective about whether the candidate is truly 'better' than most people on the team (raises the bar). Although good in theory- its not actually practical to find every single new person better than the current employees but it helps keep things in perspective and is a deterrent to bringing in weak buddies. Its true Amazon has some great engineers but is not a very engineering centric. I remember a senior engineer in Retail once comparing it to a plumbing system kept together with bandages.
- kk_cz 8y agoFrom the site: In simple terms, bar raisers are current Amazon employees that come in during the interview process to analyse candidates. They do this alongside their own full-time job, assessing as many as 10 candidates a week and spending 2-3 hours on each one. In other words 20-30 hours per week on top of the full-time job? That doesn't sound quite right.
- patch_cable 8y agoAnother bar raiser here. That site is wrong. The expectation is 2 candidates a week. And it would be more proper to say that it is part of your full-time job, not on top of it. 10 candidates in a week may happen at some kind of event, but then it isn’t 2-3 hours per candidate, and in that case you’d effectively be taking a couple of days off from your normal job.
- BryantD 8y agoThis doesn't completely answer the question, but I would distinguish UI and UX from the ability to build systems that run successfully at Amazon scale.
- cma 8y agoCorporate meme thing like six sigma. Each new employee is supposed to raise the bar, or the whole organization gets worse on average. Jeff Bezos as #1 is supposedly the least qualified employee in the company as each new hire raised the bar.
- booleandilemma 8y agowhat is a bar raiser? A PM who has never opened an IDE in his or her life and who is only familiar with “coding” concepts through Wikipedia. They read books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb and majored in one of the humanities. When they’re shown the webpage that the geeks created which loads in 2 seconds, they tell the lead developer that they want the loading time cut down to 1 second and the font to be changed.
- overkalix 8y agoHey hey hey. What's wrong with Kahneman?
- dabockster 8y ago> The bar had to be lowered to meet the demands of growth. Not only that, but I've noticed that Amazon has started using way more contractors (not actual firms, but more Mechanical Turk/UpWork like contractors, if not just straight up misclassification) and agencies within the past year or so. I can't say that I'm surprised that Amazon is having technical issues now that they've grew in numbers but not in technical chops. On a side note, it is a great time to become a recruiter in Seattle with all these agencies popping up. /s
- smt88 8y agoThis makes me terrified that my users' security relies on AWS...
- abrookewood 8y agoHonestly don't think that is an issue. AWS is THE most certified company I have ever worked with. Seriously, go look at their compliance page - it is ridiculous. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/
- usr1106 8y agoCertification is a theater for managers and so called decision makers. It might have a positive impact on code quality as long as people are motivated. But if insiders are telling me that the workplace culture is deteriorating that is a serious problem. Certification will not prevent bad code hitting production.
- reeteshv 8y agoReminds me of several CMM Level 5 certified IT services firms consistently grounding projects into dust!
- abrookewood 8y agoI was mainly referring to the security of their systems, but I take your point.
- ergothus 8y ago> It is in many places day 2. For those unfamiliar with internal Amazon lingo, a big deal is made of it always being "day 1" https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/13/jeff-bezos-says-it-will-always-be-day-1-at-amazon.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/13/jeff-bezos-says-it...
- weka 8y ago> 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. Could you expand on this a bit, please?
- codeonfire 8y agoAn Amazon manager, full of shit, once tried to tell a joke at a social gathering. He claimed that he and friends removed the engine from someone's car over lunch as a prank. This is the education level that some of them have. He literally didn't think people would know he was full of shit.
- hueving 8y agoGullibility has little to do with 'education level'.
- phendrenad2 8y agoYou misread it - the manager wasn’t gullible, he was the one telling the fib.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIt would be technically possible to remove a car engine during lunch. However, that's not so much a prank as malicious damage. You'd also have to be a very skilled mechanic, familiar with that specific car, to do it that fast.
- joncrane 8y agoNot to mention you'd drop a lot of polluting fluids on the ground if you did it in a parking lot.
- exikyut 8y agoHonest question: education level or mental developmental level? Mental health is enough of an epidemic that $company_with_exponential_scale is most definitely going to pick up a fair chunk of people with various issues, cognitive included. Chances are this is even part of why the bar is a bit lower. (Said as someone with mild high-functioning autism)
- yeukhon 8y agoNo load testing ever?
- hossbeast 8y agoGood luck generating Prime Day load artificially.
- sitkack 8y agoPlease, generating load is always easier than servicing it.
- HankB99 8y agoCould you do something like that from another cloud service? I suppose the difference would be whether 10K requests from one IP address would be the same as 10K requests coming from 10K IP addresses. The further you move from the actual production load, the higher risk that the test doesn't test everything. For example if the network could only handle connections from 5k hosts then the former could pass while the latter failed miserably.
- pageald 8y agoSimulating millions of users should be well within the capabilities of a company as large as Amazon. Off the shelf load testing tools like Locust can create thousands of fake users with one worker.
- jjirsa 8y ago(◔_◔)
- greenleafjacob 8y agoAt Uber we invested in synthetic load tools that create fake riders and drivers, match them, etc and test our entire dispatch system end to end to arbitrary amounts of online driver and riders. I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same with carts, adding products to carts, etc
- 8y ago
- duxup 8y agoI got the impression from some former Amazon employees that they were burnt out and put their time in and got Amazon on their resume and were just done with life at Amazon so they moved on. Do you sense any attrition like that?
- rrjanbiah 8y agoFWIW, if you can look into https://github.com/rrjanbiah/amazon-india-issue-tracker https://github.com/rrjanbiah/amazon-india-issue-tracker
- ainiriand 8y agoI can see what you mean. Take for example the email I received to promote Prime. A mix of spanish and english with some very bad translation problems in spanish. It was a bit embarrasing to read it.