4 ms·

I work closely with someone who runs one of these Amazon DSPs. He has 70 employees who love working there. In the last 6 months he has had only 2 people leave,

by zaroth 5y ago

I work closely with someone who runs one of these Amazon DSPs. He has 70 employees who love working there. In the last 6 months he has had only 2 people leave, and one due to their family moving. He has a military background and he protects his people like they are his own unit. He deals with all the shit that Amazon throws down at him and builds his own processes and procedures to deal with things like day-to-day route variability. The drivers work 10 hours a day 4 days a week. He will go in every morning and tweak the routes that the AI designs so that they can finish their 10 hour route in 8 hours, he still pays them for the full 10. Sometimes they will get done in 6 hours and run another route and make 2.5x their wage on the day. He says the internal Amazon dashboards that track his company performance break due to his numbers. And everyone is making very, very good money with full benefits. I’ve seen the numbers and anyone losing money running one of these shops is just doing a very poor job hiring, training, and managing the process. I scoffed a year ago when he told me he was leaving his job to go do this. Since then I’ve eaten my words.

emptyparadise 5y ago
>He will go in every morning and tweak the routes that the AI designs so that they can finish their 10 hour route in 8 hours, he still pays them for the full 10. Amazon definitely wouldn't like to optimize that away.
- zaroth 5y ago
  There’s a huge mythology apparently in the groups that the DSPs frequently discuss these sorts of things around exactly the “right amount” you should tweak the routes, because apparently the changes are fed back into the model and can impact in strange ways what it will spit out in the future. A lot of managers swear if you take too heavy of a hand in making changes it will screw up the model and you get worse and worse routes each morning. There is apparently an art form to making these tweaks each morning that gently optimizes the routes in a way that doesn’t perturb the model. I couldn’t tell if this was just mysticism surrounding the black box algorithm or if the manual route changes are actually being saved and perhaps being over-fit in subsequent runs of the route solver.

by zaroth 5y ago

emptyparadise 5y ago

>He will go in every morning and tweak the routes that the AI designs so that they can finish their 10 hour route in 8 hours, he still pays them for the full 10. Amazon definitely wouldn't like to optimize that away.

zaroth 5y ago
There’s a huge mythology apparently in the groups that the DSPs frequently discuss these sorts of things around exactly the “right amount” you should tweak the routes, because apparently the changes are fed back into the model and can impact in strange ways what it will spit out in the future. A lot of managers swear if you take too heavy of a hand in making changes it will screw up the model and you get worse and worse routes each morning. There is apparently an art form to making these tweaks each morning that gently optimizes the routes in a way that doesn’t perturb the model. I couldn’t tell if this was just mysticism surrounding the black box algorithm or if the manual route changes are actually being saved and perhaps being over-fit in subsequent runs of the route solver.