6 ms·

Amazon Academy India

80 points by chynkm 6y ago

viig99 6y ago
Looks pretty neat
abhinavsharma 6y ago
As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is: 1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time. 2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.
- ahmadss 6y ago
  1a - build trust specifically with IIT aspirants who, even if they don't get into IIT, will hold amazon in high regard and consider amazon for employment down the line. 3. get data / insight / early access to top level test takers and build a recruiting funnel before these students start college.
  - TrainedMonkey 6y ago
    Yeah, I think data is the goldmine. If you know what questions to ask to quickly estimate someones ability to be successful in school/workplace you can just do shotgun approach hiring. As one of the largest software companies in the world that is a savvy move, although for some reason I can't quite figure out it does feel somewhat sleazy. When I worked for Sybase there was following brain drain pipeline from India office: * Hire a bunch of people. * Move brightest and hardest working to U.S. on H1B. * Use that PR to hire a bunch more people in India.
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  So essentially... Cheap workers?
  - nine_zeros 6y ago
    No. More consumers who will choose amazon over competing e-commerce marketplaces.
  - asdfasdpljtl 6y ago
    You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?
    - ahmadss 6y ago
      so you're assuming that nothing will change in the next 5-10 years?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      No they are not. The average job profile might be a bit lower but FAANG has plenty of high paying job opportunities in India.
    - duxup 6y ago
      They are? I haven't worked for FAANG but I've certainly seen a lot of India tech jobs hired by American companies that I wouldn't consider "low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with".
    - hiyer 6y ago
      Can't speak for other FAANGs but this is definitely not true of Amazon India. They have teams working on everything from Alexa to new AWS services, and of course retail as well. Not to mention Amazon India itself which is pretty unique and innovative in its own ways. Amazon also pays a lot compared to most other tech employers in India - a lot less than Amazon US of course, but it's still not just "cheap labour".
  - vendroo 6y ago
    True! But more like finding a new efficient frontier for talent. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/operations-logistics-supply-chain-terms/3392-efficient-frontier.html https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/operations-logist...
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  I am now surprised one of the tech giants hasn’t tried this with SAT prep.
  - Sherl 6y ago
    Human capital. Many SAT schools often have 1x1 training but with JEE India, all you need is right course content and prep materials and often students pickup from it. Often in India, JEE is one of the most respected entry path and students who take it are extremely motivated to the likes of silio ing their life for nothing but exam prep, for years.
- hm8 6y ago
  I hope that, in addition to, improving their recruiting funnel and brand value; this effort serves to improve diversity in tech. We have talked about tech companies throwing their hands in the air to encourage college admissions rate from under-represented classes. Hopefully, this move to go down the funnel leads to that improvement!
gooftop 6y ago
Whoa.. talk about disrupting the IIT-prep cottage industry! Of course, I haven't seen the details of whether it's an effective tool or not, but as a free service that can only improve and scale over time .. should be a gamechanger. (For those outside India who are not aware of the exam that the academy is targeted at, its for admission to a collection of premier Engineering schools in the country. The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. There is a huge cottage industry of paid 'tutorial classes' and online programs to help students succeed in the exam.)
- yunohn 6y ago
  > IIT-prep cottage industry I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. It's worth over 2B$ [1], and has existed for over a decade. There are behemoths like Byjus, Kota, FIITJEE, etc. and innumerable informal options. 1. https://inc42.com/datalab/with-the-largest-share-of-funding-test-prep-startups-leading-the-edtech-charge-in-india/ https://inc42.com/datalab/with-the-largest-share-of-funding-...
  - palerdot 6y ago
    > I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. GP's comment is more about mushrooming of tutorials/tuition centers on every nook and corner for IIT JEE prep, similar to any cottage industry.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Byjus is irrelevant in the IIT cottage industry. They are newer, and only online. And no company can convince Indian parents that online is better that 8am-8pm classroom coaching.
    - finnh 6y ago
      Does "no company" include Amazon? I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen the varied abilities of their elementary school teachers makes me think a top-flight online course could do much better than some of the actual people working at their school. There's no question the best teachers will outperform the best online content. But what are your odds of hiring the best teachers?
Sherl 6y ago
Amazon entering into education prep business? India's JEE seems just right for this.
adi2907 6y ago
Have always marvelled at Amazon’s ability to do local Innovation at scale. Here is a behemoth for whom India is 10 percent of global revenue, yet launch a service which has nothing to do with their core e-commerce and cloud functions. Is it to get users, hiring tool or make more money. Will be interesting to learn the culture which facilities such decision making - any other large company would have shot down such a crazy idea long ago
- amzwazy 6y ago
  They have a very flat / horizontal management structure for such a large company. Usually for an IC it goes: You <- Manager/PMs <- VP <- SVP <- Bezos or C-level. Usually a manager runs a 2-10 person team who they advocate for, and a few PMs interact with the teams that work on the projects they oversee. The PMs are sort of like sales in a traditional company, customer-facing roles who prioritize and occasionally promise features. There are usually enough VPs that you can meet with one if you have an idea that your peers like, and the support of a VP seems to be enough to let a small team work on a tangent for a year or two. It sounds a lot like how Google develops new products, because it's surprisingly easy to turn a working proof-of-concept into a public-facing product or service. So why don't they suffer from the product-killing disease that plagues Google? I don't know, but I have a couple ideas: * Amazon throws people and money at things that work. Products like Lambda and Alexa used to be small upstarts with modest expectations, but when they sold well, the company invested heavily in them. * Amazon promotes people based on peer feedback and manager recommendations. It's an easy system to game, and there's a bit of graft as teams defend likeable underperformers since they stopped leaning so heavily on "rank-and-yank" performance reviews. But it also means that you can get promoted for maintenance, like "X prepared our retail service for holiday traffic, and we didn't lose millions in sales when it didn't crash." I'm not sure how applicable their management structure is to most organizations, though. They can tolerate massive loss-leaders because they have a couple of money printers, and they re-invest most of that money in the company rather than sitting on it or paying it out in dividends. People tend to like working there if they can cope with a bit of stress, and I saw as many people leave the company as I saw take internal transfers during my time there, so "tribal knowledge" also fades more slowly despite the churn.
tregsthedev 6y ago
Woah what is this entrily?
tomcat27 6y ago
lol, is there anything amazon doesn't want to do on planet earth
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anuila 6y ago
  They do offer everything from a to z.
disown 6y ago
I wonder if this is just a sneaky way of finding potential employees by amazon. Have millions of people ( some of the brightest in the country ) take tests, gather their data, run that data through an algorithm and offer jobs to those selected by the algorithm.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  I say -- bingo
zerop 6y ago
What's the purpose: catch brilliant minds early?
ffpip 6y ago
I've used a previous version of this app (jee ready or something similar) to prepare for JEE. It was okayish
imranq 6y ago
As someone who has worked at Amazon as a PM, it's always surprising how many different verticals that the company expands to. But it's probably not all that surprising: 1. Long-term approach in attracting the best technical minds in India via brand value and staying relevant with the new generation. 2. Lots of eLearning platforms internally so easy to build out 3. Amazon selling books --> Amazon helping with exams isn't that big of a stretch
bergstromm466 6y ago
Yes, educating/training workers in a Global South country that has already been heavily underdeveloped, in order to get cheap labor -- what an original formula. If you don't see something, answer me this: why don't they do anything like this in the US?
somberi 6y ago
Old enough to note how the bales of books from Brilliant and Agarwal caused a tinge of excitement and dread of so many things one did not know, has now morphed into daily app alerts.

80 points by chynkm 6y ago

Looks pretty neat

As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is: 1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time. 2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.

ahmadss 6y ago
1a - build trust specifically with IIT aspirants who, even if they don't get into IIT, will hold amazon in high regard and consider amazon for employment down the line. 3. get data / insight / early access to top level test takers and build a recruiting funnel before these students start college.
- TrainedMonkey 6y ago
  Yeah, I think data is the goldmine. If you know what questions to ask to quickly estimate someones ability to be successful in school/workplace you can just do shotgun approach hiring. As one of the largest software companies in the world that is a savvy move, although for some reason I can't quite figure out it does feel somewhat sleazy. When I worked for Sybase there was following brain drain pipeline from India office: * Hire a bunch of people. * Move brightest and hardest working to U.S. on H1B. * Use that PR to hire a bunch more people in India.
blackbear_ 6y ago
So essentially... Cheap workers?
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  No. More consumers who will choose amazon over competing e-commerce marketplaces.
- asdfasdpljtl 6y ago
  You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?
  - ahmadss 6y ago
    so you're assuming that nothing will change in the next 5-10 years?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    No they are not. The average job profile might be a bit lower but FAANG has plenty of high paying job opportunities in India.
  - duxup 6y ago
    They are? I haven't worked for FAANG but I've certainly seen a lot of India tech jobs hired by American companies that I wouldn't consider "low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with".
  - hiyer 6y ago
    Can't speak for other FAANGs but this is definitely not true of Amazon India. They have teams working on everything from Alexa to new AWS services, and of course retail as well. Not to mention Amazon India itself which is pretty unique and innovative in its own ways. Amazon also pays a lot compared to most other tech employers in India - a lot less than Amazon US of course, but it's still not just "cheap labour".
- vendroo 6y ago
  True! But more like finding a new efficient frontier for talent. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/operations-logistics-supply-chain-terms/3392-efficient-frontier.html https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/operations-logist...
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
I am now surprised one of the tech giants hasn’t tried this with SAT prep.
- Sherl 6y ago
  Human capital. Many SAT schools often have 1x1 training but with JEE India, all you need is right course content and prep materials and often students pickup from it. Often in India, JEE is one of the most respected entry path and students who take it are extremely motivated to the likes of silio ing their life for nothing but exam prep, for years.
hm8 6y ago
I hope that, in addition to, improving their recruiting funnel and brand value; this effort serves to improve diversity in tech. We have talked about tech companies throwing their hands in the air to encourage college admissions rate from under-represented classes. Hopefully, this move to go down the funnel leads to that improvement!

gooftop 6y ago

Whoa.. talk about disrupting the IIT-prep cottage industry! Of course, I haven't seen the details of whether it's an effective tool or not, but as a free service that can only improve and scale over time .. should be a gamechanger. (For those outside India who are not aware of the exam that the academy is targeted at, its for admission to a collection of premier Engineering schools in the country. The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. There is a huge cottage industry of paid 'tutorial classes' and online programs to help students succeed in the exam.)

yunohn 6y ago
> IIT-prep cottage industry I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. It's worth over 2B$ [1], and has existed for over a decade. There are behemoths like Byjus, Kota, FIITJEE, etc. and innumerable informal options. 1. https://inc42.com/datalab/with-the-largest-share-of-funding-test-prep-startups-leading-the-edtech-charge-in-india/ https://inc42.com/datalab/with-the-largest-share-of-funding-...
- palerdot 6y ago
  > I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. GP's comment is more about mushrooming of tutorials/tuition centers on every nook and corner for IIT JEE prep, similar to any cottage industry.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Byjus is irrelevant in the IIT cottage industry. They are newer, and only online. And no company can convince Indian parents that online is better that 8am-8pm classroom coaching.
  - finnh 6y ago
    Does "no company" include Amazon? I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen the varied abilities of their elementary school teachers makes me think a top-flight online course could do much better than some of the actual people working at their school. There's no question the best teachers will outperform the best online content. But what are your odds of hiring the best teachers?

Sherl 6y ago

Amazon entering into education prep business? India's JEE seems just right for this.

adi2907 6y ago

Have always marvelled at Amazon’s ability to do local Innovation at scale. Here is a behemoth for whom India is 10 percent of global revenue, yet launch a service which has nothing to do with their core e-commerce and cloud functions. Is it to get users, hiring tool or make more money. Will be interesting to learn the culture which facilities such decision making - any other large company would have shot down such a crazy idea long ago

amzwazy 6y ago
They have a very flat / horizontal management structure for such a large company. Usually for an IC it goes: You <- Manager/PMs <- VP <- SVP <- Bezos or C-level. Usually a manager runs a 2-10 person team who they advocate for, and a few PMs interact with the teams that work on the projects they oversee. The PMs are sort of like sales in a traditional company, customer-facing roles who prioritize and occasionally promise features. There are usually enough VPs that you can meet with one if you have an idea that your peers like, and the support of a VP seems to be enough to let a small team work on a tangent for a year or two. It sounds a lot like how Google develops new products, because it's surprisingly easy to turn a working proof-of-concept into a public-facing product or service. So why don't they suffer from the product-killing disease that plagues Google? I don't know, but I have a couple ideas: * Amazon throws people and money at things that work. Products like Lambda and Alexa used to be small upstarts with modest expectations, but when they sold well, the company invested heavily in them. * Amazon promotes people based on peer feedback and manager recommendations. It's an easy system to game, and there's a bit of graft as teams defend likeable underperformers since they stopped leaning so heavily on "rank-and-yank" performance reviews. But it also means that you can get promoted for maintenance, like "X prepared our retail service for holiday traffic, and we didn't lose millions in sales when it didn't crash." I'm not sure how applicable their management structure is to most organizations, though. They can tolerate massive loss-leaders because they have a couple of money printers, and they re-invest most of that money in the company rather than sitting on it or paying it out in dividends. People tend to like working there if they can cope with a bit of stress, and I saw as many people leave the company as I saw take internal transfers during my time there, so "tribal knowledge" also fades more slowly despite the churn.

tregsthedev 6y ago

Woah what is this entrily?

tomcat27 6y ago

lol, is there anything amazon doesn't want to do on planet earth

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anuila 6y ago
They do offer everything from a to z.

disown 6y ago

I wonder if this is just a sneaky way of finding potential employees by amazon. Have millions of people ( some of the brightest in the country ) take tests, gather their data, run that data through an algorithm and offer jobs to those selected by the algorithm.

bergstromm466 6y ago
I say -- bingo

zerop 6y ago

What's the purpose: catch brilliant minds early?

ffpip 6y ago

I've used a previous version of this app (jee ready or something similar) to prepare for JEE. It was okayish

imranq 6y ago

As someone who has worked at Amazon as a PM, it's always surprising how many different verticals that the company expands to. But it's probably not all that surprising: 1. Long-term approach in attracting the best technical minds in India via brand value and staying relevant with the new generation. 2. Lots of eLearning platforms internally so easy to build out 3. Amazon selling books --> Amazon helping with exams isn't that big of a stretch

bergstromm466 6y ago

Yes, educating/training workers in a Global South country that has already been heavily underdeveloped, in order to get cheap labor -- what an original formula. If you don't see something, answer me this: why don't they do anything like this in the US?

somberi 6y ago

Old enough to note how the bales of books from Brilliant and Agarwal caused a tinge of excitement and dread of so many things one did not know, has now morphed into daily app alerts.