4 ms·

Friction is a continuum. As the company gets smaller, the amount of friction gets lower. Also it depends on what you do for the company, putting a button on

Friction is a continuum. As the company gets smaller, the amount of friction gets lower. Also it depends on what you do for the company, putting a button on the front page of Amazon.com has more friction than putting a button on an internal service support tool or a test tool. That is to say Big companies can be OK if you land in the right department.

camtarn 4y ago
Yes, that's probably true, but ... as somebody who actually put a button on the front page of Amazon.com (back in 2010-ish, I wrote the presentation code for an MP3 sample player for album recommendations) it was actually pretty low friction. Write code, test it locally, deploy it as an A/B test, test was not negative - ship it. The only people I had to talk to were translators for internationalization. There was a team that was responsible for cohesive look-and-feel across the gateway (front page), but mostly they trusted us to do our thing. The principle of a team completely owning their little bit of territory within a page on the Amazon site was a very good one, IMO, and helped cut down on what could have been a bureaucratic nightmare. Of course it had its downsides: some teams didn't pay as much attention to presentation or browser compatibility or interoperability in a range of scenarios as others did; and by its very nature, this team organisation led to pages which were divided into not-particularly-cohesive slices, each its own little fiefdom. Still, there are some BigCorps which do at least pay attention to optimising processes, even if it's only in a particular direction. (Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy. Want to talk at an open source conference or ship open source software? ...ooh, we'd better talk to the lawyers.)
- throwaway552653 4y ago
  > Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy. This might have been true years ago, but my recent experience has sadly been the opposite. e.g. on the projects I worked involving the website, testing locally has been virtually impossible.

camtarn 4y ago

Yes, that's probably true, but ... as somebody who actually put a button on the front page of Amazon.com (back in 2010-ish, I wrote the presentation code for an MP3 sample player for album recommendations) it was actually pretty low friction. Write code, test it locally, deploy it as an A/B test, test was not negative - ship it. The only people I had to talk to were translators for internationalization. There was a team that was responsible for cohesive look-and-feel across the gateway (front page), but mostly they trusted us to do our thing. The principle of a team completely owning their little bit of territory within a page on the Amazon site was a very good one, IMO, and helped cut down on what could have been a bureaucratic nightmare. Of course it had its downsides: some teams didn't pay as much attention to presentation or browser compatibility or interoperability in a range of scenarios as others did; and by its very nature, this team organisation led to pages which were divided into not-particularly-cohesive slices, each its own little fiefdom. Still, there are some BigCorps which do at least pay attention to optimising processes, even if it's only in a particular direction. (Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy. Want to talk at an open source conference or ship open source software? ...ooh, we'd better talk to the lawyers.)

throwaway552653 4y ago
> Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy. This might have been true years ago, but my recent experience has sadly been the opposite. e.g. on the projects I worked involving the website, testing locally has been virtually impossible.