4 ms·
Marvel at the feat of operations, not the engineering. The techniques used to process this information over the years have mostly been quite banal. Look behin
by femto113 7y ago
Marvel at the feat of operations, not the engineering. The techniques used to process this information over the years have mostly been quite banal. Look behind the scenes and much of it is just batch processes written in old school languages (Perl, Java, even C) reading text files from one folder, filtering or enhancing them, and writing them out to another. I once taught a PM how to use a Perl hash to do a join instead of nested for loops and she spent the next year feeling godlike because she could do this stuff in O(n) instead of O(n^2).
- willberman 7y agoCorrect I think that would be a better way to put it. None of the individual building blocks seem very technically challenging, but to consistently enforce it at a company wide scale seems quite cool.
- anongraddebt 7y ago> I once taught a PM how to use a Perl hash to do a join instead of nested for loops and she spent the next year feeling godlike because she could do this stuff in O(n) instead of O(n^2). Loved this.
- auggierose 7y agoWhat’s a PM, prime minister?
- capableweb 7y agoBecause of the context, I'd assume "Project Manager", basically a low-level manager of sorts.
- femto113 7y agoAt Amazon "Program Manager", in this case really was a TPM or "Technical Program Manager". TPMs are effectively serial project managers, often charged with shepherding complex projects that require the efforts of more than one business or development group. Dealing with the data produced by those projects sometimes fell on them since it was difficult enough to persuade the developers to write the primary functionality.