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What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete, perfect as it is. The website could re

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete, perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each month? It certainly isn't reflected in my browsing experience. The British cracked the German naval codes with no more mathematicians than can sit at a table. But Amazon needs thousands of engineers to run an e-commerce website (and its concurrent AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers)? (Not a software engineer or someone who's ever worked for $AMZN) Edit: Woosh, way too many people failed to understand that this post was mostly sarcasm. Cunningham's Law in action.

aetherson 5y ago
Most Amazon engineers do not work on the amazon.com front end.
tequila_shot 5y ago
They have other suites of products apart from the AMZN.com. - AWS and the shitload of solutions on AWS come to mind. - A lot of internal tools for managing supply chain, financials etc also come to my mind.
luma 5y ago
AWS is a money printing machine in a very dynamic market. They need to keep the pace or MS will eat their lunch.
hermannj314 5y ago
Amazon also sells hardware (kindles, echo, sidewalk), has a media platform through Prime, has logistics software for vendor and order fulfillment, in addition you are underestimating the cost of running a global e-commerce site (legal complicance, security, privacy, accessibility, etc. are constant technical draws on even established products)
0kl 5y ago
Amazon web services runs a fair share of the internet. Around 33% as of Sept 2020 according to Forbes [^1]. [^1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-amazon-quietly-powers-the-internet https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-a...
brazzy 5y ago
>AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers)? What the... > (Not a software engineer Ah, yes. It shows. 50 engineers is probably less than the size of some support teams within Amazon that handle a single large corporate AWS customer.
- middleclick 5y ago
  This is a peak HN comment (the one you are replying to)! The other day on the Wikipedia thread, there was a data scientist who said he could run a website like Wikipedia all by himself. "How hard it is?". And here we have the same thing for Amazon..
  - earth2mars 5y ago
    AWS have close to 200 services. If the origina cmmenter js saying each service has 50 folks, it is 10k people. Which sounds about right the company have more than a million people working across all sub organizations. So you can imagine all kinds of work environments
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Admittedly I've even heard senior executives rhetorically ask "What do all those people at $LOCATION even do?" At scale, you need a lot to sell, support customers, put marketing programs in place, do developer outreach, test, be on call, etc. etc. But, yeah, you'd think it would obvious that even just talking about straight engineering, you need more than a fraction of a person to develop and enhance each AWS service.
- stavros 5y ago
  Listen if you can't run 33% of the internet with 50 engineers what are you even doing?
bennysomething 5y ago
How do you know it's "finished"? You could have said the same thing in 2006 and been completely wrong. What makes you think the customer front end of Amazon is where the bulk of the engineering is? Edit: engineering and maintaining the infrastructure of Amazon compared Vs cracking a code in world war two seems like a strange comparison.
terafo 5y ago
AWS alone requires thousands of software engineers. And there is Amazon Echo, Twitch, Prime Video, a lot of software for warehouses and logistics, their autonomous stores, game studios, Kindle, Amazon Fire devices, their app store, Audible and I barely scratched the surface.
rytill 5y ago
> and its concurrent AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers One engineer for every four offerings.
jlund-molfese 5y ago
Heavily-utilized websites are like icebergs. You see the homepage, but what about the constant ongoing work to ensure sellers don't game your review system? What about emergent product categories? What about integration with your competitor's new smart home device? Amazon doesn't pay most of its engineers to sit around.
lwhi 5y ago
Too many assumptions here. You need to consider the number of the tech products and the number of markets. The resulting number would be vast.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
a4isms 5y ago
Consider this metaphor: You go on vacation. You stay at a hotel, not a “B&B.” Your vacation, your money, so you find a place close to the things you want to see, with plenty of free amenities like free continental breakfast and free WiFi. It’s somewhat reasonably priced, too. Now you go on a business trip financed by your employer, who books you into a “business class” hotel. It’s also close to things you want to see, and it has a few nicer finishes than your vacation hotel. But the service is worse! You have to order WiFi, and they have some annoying provider that puts roadblocks between you and their slow WiFi. There’s free coffee in the room, but if you want breakfast, you pay nosebleed prices for room service or you have to line up for a table in their brunch restaurant. And their “rack rate” for rooms is double what you paid on vacation! How could your employer be so stupid as to book you into this expensive hotel and force you to suffer worse service? Makes no sense. Ok, what’s the connection? ——— Well, WHY does your employer prefer the expensive place with bad service? The answer is that it provides good service for your employer, but not for you. YOU AREN’T THEIR CUSTOMER. The business-class hotel integrates with your employer’s billing and expense systems. Your company can easily book dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of rooms when they’re putting on a conference. They have incentive pricing that appeals to companies, not people. They have GREAT customer service when you’re calling about a billing code, but not when you’re calling about an extra pot of hot water for your tea. We don’t see that as guests of the hotel. So if we were to discover that the big hotel chain has hundreds or even thousands of programmers, we’d ask, “What do they need so many engineers for? All they have is a crappy web site that can take a reservation, in a crappy way.” We don’t see the people putting in the work to integrate with systems we can’t see, serving the needs of people and companies we don’t even know exist. I betcha it’s the same at Amazon. We can’t judge the complexity of their operations looking at the page they serve us when we buy a book online. We have no idea what’s involved integrating with the corporations that provide them with music, TV shows, and movies to stream. We have no idea how complicated it is to integrate with all the logistics systems around shipping products around the world, in real time. There’s a massive machine we can’t see. That’s what all those programmers are building and maintaining.
- ghaff 5y ago
  While I don't disagree with your general point, I'm not sure it broadly applies here. Honestly, a nice B&B is probably priced pretty similarly to a business-class hotel. Why do I usually stay in business class hotels in cities? Chain hotels like Marriott's brands are pretty consistent quantities. A random B&B really isn't. Business class hotels also tend to have 24-hour desks, I can leave my luggage after checkout, etc. If I don't really care much about the hotel, which tends to be the case when I'm traveling in a city on business, some mid-level chain hotel is just less mental overhead.
ghaff 5y ago
Seems like you should get off your butt and create an AWS competitor with 50 engineers. You'll be able to underprice them by so much you'll completely eat their lunch.
padastra 5y ago
You should ask yourself how you can be so self-assured yet wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm not saying that as an insult -- it's probably worth re-evaluating your confidence : accuracy relationship.
- lucasyvas 5y ago
  Indeed, a truly remarkable disconnect with reality that honestly makes me question the point of having an account on a site called "Hacker News."
oschvr 5y ago
Imagine being this delusional
nuclearnice1 5y ago
Well this controversial opinion sure got pounded down. > The British cracked the German naval codes with no more mathematicians than can sit at a table. The Government Code and Cipher School employed almost 10k people during ww2.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but you couldn't fit all those 10k people in a Hollywood movie.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  And the Polish mathematicians who reverse engineered the Enigma machines weren't invited to sit at the table once they shared their work with the British and French
thesuperbigfrog 5y ago
>> Not a software engineer or someone who's ever worked for AMZN. Exactly. There is SO much more going on than you realize. The Amazon retail website gets hundreds of thousands of orders every second. New code gets deployed literally every night. The retail website is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. There are hundreds of web services underneath that provide the backend and data stores. Each one of those services has a team of engineers to maintain the service with one engineer oncall 24/7.
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
They have a big product portfolio, so less than 50 engineers is a big stretch even in the best of circumstances. But they are clearly in a very deep hole of technical debt that they will never be able to dig themselves out of, so all they can do is throw more people at the problem. I don’t think this warrants being downvoted to the point of being barely readable. The estimate may be way off, but it’s a perfectly good basis for a discussion. Please don’t do this when you can use words instead.
amazon_throw 5y ago
HAHAHAHHHHa hah... hah. ha hah cough Oh, wow, what an amazing take. You owe me a new keyboard.

aetherson 5y ago

Most Amazon engineers do not work on the amazon.com front end.

tequila_shot 5y ago

They have other suites of products apart from the AMZN.com. - AWS and the shitload of solutions on AWS come to mind. - A lot of internal tools for managing supply chain, financials etc also come to my mind.

luma 5y ago

AWS is a money printing machine in a very dynamic market. They need to keep the pace or MS will eat their lunch.

hermannj314 5y ago

Amazon also sells hardware (kindles, echo, sidewalk), has a media platform through Prime, has logistics software for vendor and order fulfillment, in addition you are underestimating the cost of running a global e-commerce site (legal complicance, security, privacy, accessibility, etc. are constant technical draws on even established products)

0kl 5y ago

Amazon web services runs a fair share of the internet. Around 33% as of Sept 2020 according to Forbes [^1]. [^1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-amazon-quietly-powers-the-internet https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-a...

brazzy 5y ago

>AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers)? What the... > (Not a software engineer Ah, yes. It shows. 50 engineers is probably less than the size of some support teams within Amazon that handle a single large corporate AWS customer.

middleclick 5y ago
This is a peak HN comment (the one you are replying to)! The other day on the Wikipedia thread, there was a data scientist who said he could run a website like Wikipedia all by himself. "How hard it is?". And here we have the same thing for Amazon..
- earth2mars 5y ago
  AWS have close to 200 services. If the origina cmmenter js saying each service has 50 folks, it is 10k people. Which sounds about right the company have more than a million people working across all sub organizations. So you can imagine all kinds of work environments
- ghaff 5y ago
  Admittedly I've even heard senior executives rhetorically ask "What do all those people at $LOCATION even do?" At scale, you need a lot to sell, support customers, put marketing programs in place, do developer outreach, test, be on call, etc. etc. But, yeah, you'd think it would obvious that even just talking about straight engineering, you need more than a fraction of a person to develop and enhance each AWS service.
stavros 5y ago
Listen if you can't run 33% of the internet with 50 engineers what are you even doing?

bennysomething 5y ago

How do you know it's "finished"? You could have said the same thing in 2006 and been completely wrong. What makes you think the customer front end of Amazon is where the bulk of the engineering is? Edit: engineering and maintaining the infrastructure of Amazon compared Vs cracking a code in world war two seems like a strange comparison.

terafo 5y ago

AWS alone requires thousands of software engineers. And there is Amazon Echo, Twitch, Prime Video, a lot of software for warehouses and logistics, their autonomous stores, game studios, Kindle, Amazon Fire devices, their app store, Audible and I barely scratched the surface.

rytill 5y ago

> and its concurrent AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers One engineer for every four offerings.

jlund-molfese 5y ago

Heavily-utilized websites are like icebergs. You see the homepage, but what about the constant ongoing work to ensure sellers don't game your review system? What about emergent product categories? What about integration with your competitor's new smart home device? Amazon doesn't pay most of its engineers to sit around.

lwhi 5y ago

Too many assumptions here. You need to consider the number of the tech products and the number of markets. The resulting number would be vast.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

a4isms 5y ago

Consider this metaphor: You go on vacation. You stay at a hotel, not a “B&B.” Your vacation, your money, so you find a place close to the things you want to see, with plenty of free amenities like free continental breakfast and free WiFi. It’s somewhat reasonably priced, too. Now you go on a business trip financed by your employer, who books you into a “business class” hotel. It’s also close to things you want to see, and it has a few nicer finishes than your vacation hotel. But the service is worse! You have to order WiFi, and they have some annoying provider that puts roadblocks between you and their slow WiFi. There’s free coffee in the room, but if you want breakfast, you pay nosebleed prices for room service or you have to line up for a table in their brunch restaurant. And their “rack rate” for rooms is double what you paid on vacation! How could your employer be so stupid as to book you into this expensive hotel and force you to suffer worse service? Makes no sense. Ok, what’s the connection? ——— Well, WHY does your employer prefer the expensive place with bad service? The answer is that it provides good service for your employer, but not for you. YOU AREN’T THEIR CUSTOMER. The business-class hotel integrates with your employer’s billing and expense systems. Your company can easily book dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of rooms when they’re putting on a conference. They have incentive pricing that appeals to companies, not people. They have GREAT customer service when you’re calling about a billing code, but not when you’re calling about an extra pot of hot water for your tea. We don’t see that as guests of the hotel. So if we were to discover that the big hotel chain has hundreds or even thousands of programmers, we’d ask, “What do they need so many engineers for? All they have is a crappy web site that can take a reservation, in a crappy way.” We don’t see the people putting in the work to integrate with systems we can’t see, serving the needs of people and companies we don’t even know exist. I betcha it’s the same at Amazon. We can’t judge the complexity of their operations looking at the page they serve us when we buy a book online. We have no idea what’s involved integrating with the corporations that provide them with music, TV shows, and movies to stream. We have no idea how complicated it is to integrate with all the logistics systems around shipping products around the world, in real time. There’s a massive machine we can’t see. That’s what all those programmers are building and maintaining.

ghaff 5y ago
While I don't disagree with your general point, I'm not sure it broadly applies here. Honestly, a nice B&B is probably priced pretty similarly to a business-class hotel. Why do I usually stay in business class hotels in cities? Chain hotels like Marriott's brands are pretty consistent quantities. A random B&B really isn't. Business class hotels also tend to have 24-hour desks, I can leave my luggage after checkout, etc. If I don't really care much about the hotel, which tends to be the case when I'm traveling in a city on business, some mid-level chain hotel is just less mental overhead.

ghaff 5y ago

Seems like you should get off your butt and create an AWS competitor with 50 engineers. You'll be able to underprice them by so much you'll completely eat their lunch.

padastra 5y ago

You should ask yourself how you can be so self-assured yet wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm not saying that as an insult -- it's probably worth re-evaluating your confidence : accuracy relationship.

lucasyvas 5y ago
Indeed, a truly remarkable disconnect with reality that honestly makes me question the point of having an account on a site called "Hacker News."

oschvr 5y ago

Imagine being this delusional

nuclearnice1 5y ago

Well this controversial opinion sure got pounded down. > The British cracked the German naval codes with no more mathematicians than can sit at a table. The Government Code and Cipher School employed almost 10k people during ww2.

oblio 5y ago
Yeah, but you couldn't fit all those 10k people in a Hollywood movie.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
And the Polish mathematicians who reverse engineered the Enigma machines weren't invited to sit at the table once they shared their work with the British and French

thesuperbigfrog 5y ago

>> Not a software engineer or someone who's ever worked for AMZN. Exactly. There is SO much more going on than you realize. The Amazon retail website gets hundreds of thousands of orders every second. New code gets deployed literally every night. The retail website is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. There are hundreds of web services underneath that provide the backend and data stores. Each one of those services has a team of engineers to maintain the service with one engineer oncall 24/7.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

They have a big product portfolio, so less than 50 engineers is a big stretch even in the best of circumstances. But they are clearly in a very deep hole of technical debt that they will never be able to dig themselves out of, so all they can do is throw more people at the problem. I don’t think this warrants being downvoted to the point of being barely readable. The estimate may be way off, but it’s a perfectly good basis for a discussion. Please don’t do this when you can use words instead.

amazon_throw 5y ago

HAHAHAHHHHa hah... hah. ha hah cough Oh, wow, what an amazing take. You owe me a new keyboard.