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> It was eye opening to consider how legally complex many such 'simple' things, like gift cards, are when implemented on a wide scale. To the armchair HN commu

by mbesto 7y ago

> It was eye opening to consider how legally complex many such 'simple' things, like gift cards, are when implemented on a wide scale. To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run <insert random silicon valley app that operates at global scale>". Here is your answer. Note - to be fair, yes many of these team are indeed bloated and work on projects that are a result of NIH syndrome, where "buy vs build" decisions just automatically default to "build". Ask anyone at Amazon if they enjoy working with the code on their custom internal ERP system and you'll know what I'm talking about.

jimmaswell 7y ago
So bloated sets of laws necessitate bloated teams.
- jasim 7y ago
  More generally, reality just gets more nuanced as things go broader or deeper in scope. Toy projects are clean, uncluttered; production code needs error handling, logging, monitoring, scaling, and much more.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    And, even more generally, it needs to be promoted and sold, money collected, customers supported, taxes paid, partners engaged with, events attended, people hired, people managed, their expenses reimbursed...
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> Ask anyone at Amazon if they enjoy working with the code on their custom internal ERP system and you'll know what I'm talking about. Can you elaborate?
- hef19898 7y ago
  Not from the tech teams, but I used to be on one of their ops teams working with ERP system. Having quite some experience with SAP before and since I came to the following conclusion: - Amazon's ERP is way better suited for e-commerce ops than SAP - SAP is much better as an overall ERP system when it comes to include non-ops / warehouse management functions - Amazon's ERP system became hard to adopt and change, meaning it kind of lost the general advantage of a custom system to compared to an off the shelf one - One of the biggest advantages of Amazon's ERP was the full integration of the webshop front end - One of the biggest mistakes Amazon made was to not develop their ERP-webshop systems into a stand-alone product (imagine Shopify with a arguably very good e-commerce ERP system) Let me elaborate on the last point. The big strength of commercial ERP systems is that they are to large part a readily available collection of best practices from countless companies. By keeping it all in-house Amazon lost that opportunity to learn. IMHO it is not the system that gives Amazon the edge but the way it is used, so incorporating eyternal best practices coupd only help. Also, from the commercial side, it is one gigantic missed opportunity. Imagine a SaaS version of Amazon's ERP running all the shops currently using stuff like Shopifyone that is used by countless small stores as a point of sale software with integrated inventory ans warehouse management functions. That would allow Amazon to create a global, decentralized ERP environment fully integrated into any existing or future fulfillment solutions Amazon has. The upside for Amazon and users of such a system are basically endless.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run <insert random silicon valley app that operates at global scale>". Here is your answer. I think the usual question isn't why a random SV app yas 1k engineers, but why does it have < 100 engineers and 2k+ administrative and sales&marketing people. The answer is the same, but let's be clear: this is not an engineering job. It's legal and sales job.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I don't think many really say that about monsters like Amazon. It's usually these very limited in scope and functionality like Twitter that boggle the mind.

by mbesto 7y ago

jimmaswell 7y ago

So bloated sets of laws necessitate bloated teams.

jasim 7y ago
More generally, reality just gets more nuanced as things go broader or deeper in scope. Toy projects are clean, uncluttered; production code needs error handling, logging, monitoring, scaling, and much more.
- ghaff 7y ago
  And, even more generally, it needs to be promoted and sold, money collected, customers supported, taxes paid, partners engaged with, events attended, people hired, people managed, their expenses reimbursed...

akhilcacharya 7y ago

> Ask anyone at Amazon if they enjoy working with the code on their custom internal ERP system and you'll know what I'm talking about. Can you elaborate?

hef19898 7y ago
Not from the tech teams, but I used to be on one of their ops teams working with ERP system. Having quite some experience with SAP before and since I came to the following conclusion: - Amazon's ERP is way better suited for e-commerce ops than SAP - SAP is much better as an overall ERP system when it comes to include non-ops / warehouse management functions - Amazon's ERP system became hard to adopt and change, meaning it kind of lost the general advantage of a custom system to compared to an off the shelf one - One of the biggest advantages of Amazon's ERP was the full integration of the webshop front end - One of the biggest mistakes Amazon made was to not develop their ERP-webshop systems into a stand-alone product (imagine Shopify with a arguably very good e-commerce ERP system) Let me elaborate on the last point. The big strength of commercial ERP systems is that they are to large part a readily available collection of best practices from countless companies. By keeping it all in-house Amazon lost that opportunity to learn. IMHO it is not the system that gives Amazon the edge but the way it is used, so incorporating eyternal best practices coupd only help. Also, from the commercial side, it is one gigantic missed opportunity. Imagine a SaaS version of Amazon's ERP running all the shops currently using stuff like Shopifyone that is used by countless small stores as a point of sale software with integrated inventory ans warehouse management functions. That would allow Amazon to create a global, decentralized ERP environment fully integrated into any existing or future fulfillment solutions Amazon has. The upside for Amazon and users of such a system are basically endless.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> To the armchair HN community who ask "why does it take 1k engineers to run <insert random silicon valley app that operates at global scale>". Here is your answer. I think the usual question isn't why a random SV app yas 1k engineers, but why does it have < 100 engineers and 2k+ administrative and sales&marketing people. The answer is the same, but let's be clear: this is not an engineering job. It's legal and sales job.

jjeaff 7y ago
I don't think many really say that about monsters like Amazon. It's usually these very limited in scope and functionality like Twitter that boggle the mind.