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A lot of people inside that company carrying on an illusion of providing value. Managers stacked on managers, cracking their whips on reports to build tech that
by greatpostman 4y ago
A lot of people inside that company carrying on an illusion of providing value. Managers stacked on managers, cracking their whips on reports to build tech that never adds anything at all to the company
- justahuman74 4y agoWhat are some examples of things being built that are not adding anything to the company?
- ryanisnan 4y agoAmazon health lake, maybe?
- greatpostman 4y agoI worked there a few years. The thing is, some systems are so complex it might take 6-9 months to even understand the value add within the org. At which point it comes to light that there is very little value add. And all the meetings you were kept from attending were political gatekeeping. An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
- killingtime74 4y agoDid people working on that engine know that their work is being ignored?
- greatpostman 4y agoYes…but the thing is downstream systems are dynamic and real time, so “could” use the recommendations, but never actually do. Hypothetically… This type of thing goes on all over the company. Another example, a complex “data provider platform”. Which is actually just spinning up spark clusters, joining data, and making it available to downstream consumers. There’s a lot of bells and whistles, notifications built on top. Strip away the details, it’s just doing a join. Ten engineers, two senior engineers making 500k, long hours. That’s Amazon.
- operatingthetan 4y agoI encountered the same sort of problems at amazon, I felt like it was because leadership didn't incentivize those optimizations to be made across the org. We'd identify some team that was the only one that could help us with something and nobody would lift a finger for us. Teams who were on the hook would ship us incomplete and untested APIs claiming they were done in order to work on other stuff. Managers didn't want to bring it up with other teams because of political ramifications.
- mattnewton 4y agoThat’s insane, how do the people in the org justify their work for promotion? There isn’t any need to map it back to observed top line metric shifts even for a 30 person effort?
- greatpostman 4y ago“Person xyz built a complex model deployment system, capable of updating the recommendation engine in real time, with automated rollbacks and A/B testing. He leveraged 4 junior engineers and collaborated with multiple data science teams”
- ethbr0 4y agoIndeed, this is why corporate KPIs exist. Requiring everything to move KPIs is psychotic, but if your effort should have moved a KPI, and didn't, then you'd better have a damn good story about how it delivered value elsewhere instead.
- raz32dust 4y agoI think you are describing all big tech companies. But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org. 20% of the org delivers 80% of the value. But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%. When times are tough, it doesn't.
- greatpostman 4y agoDefinitely it makes sense to take bets on new tech. But a lot of higher up managers are not running these projects in good faith. At some level they know the projects are futile, and many around them are playing a game acting otherwise
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- raz32dust 4y agoHow do you know that? I don't disagree that many projects are futile. But it is usually only apparent in hindsight, and humans are very good at justifying their own jobs and by extension, their team's jobs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imiric 4y ago> But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org. Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters. We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable. > But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%. Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
- harryVic 4y agoHow does a team of 30 not measure the usage of their system?
- diceduckmonk 4y agoCan’t speak for Amazon, but when I was Google a bunch of high level leads were building a less generic / powerful / expressive Angular, implemented using Angular, so it’s an order of magnitude more sluggish. They were from eng prod (building tools for developers) but had no front end experience. I’ve been around the block enough to see how management can tie BS projects back into the scope of some director level “vision”. When it’s a bull market, everyone in the org wins.
- raverbashing 4y agoYeah, that sounds like something that would happen at Google, and done by backend engineers And then this one project adopts it for some random reason and you're left holding the bag
- simfree 4y agoFrom what I've heard frontend engineers are considered less skilled than backend engineers at Google?
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoThat's the general thinking across the industry not just at Google.
- bigfoot675 4y agoI don't think so?
- sangnoir 4y agoFrom my unscientific observations from 3+ years ago: frontend has a lower bar of entry, and more competition by being the default software engineering discipline of choice for those transitioning from Design roles or coding boot camps. It also empirically paid less, all things being equal.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoAlexa has apparently torched 10 billion dollars (just in 2022!) with nothing to show for positive cash flow. It's a cool gadget but they bet the damn farm on it. Thousands of people working on it over the years, all to just lose billions of dollars.
- throwaway5959 4y agoI’d really like to understand what all those people are doing. Like I can understand hundreds, but thousands? Does this thing carry on normal conversations with this people at this point? Like does it do much more than act as an alarm clock or Amazon order taker? Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?
- JTBooth 4y agoRelated experience: I spent two years on Google Assistant's media team. We were ~35 people. Projects included integration with YouTube (5 person team), the visual UI for touch screens in cars (8), performance improvements (3-4), making "play" and "pause" commands work through the lock screen (3 people), backend migration to a new struct for representing a user query built by the linguists (5 people)
- throwaway5959 4y agoAh I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around.
- mattlondon 4y agoIf people shift around, you still need people to support the previous work too, so you don't really gain anything. You still need 5 people to support and iterate features that YouTube effort etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- halestock 4y agoAlexa?
- dv_dt 4y agoPerhaps the Amazon employee evaluation system has selected for employees that can play the selection game instead of delivering value. Classic case of the measurement getting gamed and distorting the thing it was supposed to measure.
- simfree 4y agoThe evaluation system at Amazon drives a culture where most white collar staff won't be there 2 to 3 years from now and they realize they are in a stressful meatgrinder just around the time they start to gain a working knowledge of the project they have been assigned to. It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently. Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.
- CSMastermind 4y agoIt goes deeper than just the evaluation system. It's that Amazon is the definition of "process over people". To the point where the people are seen as fungible, interchangeable, and easily replaced. The evaluation system is just the logical outcome of the much deeper culture that drives the company.
- dv_dt 4y agoThe evaluation system does not exist on it's own. People run and maintain that system even it it appears as a naturalistic set of immutable rules to most subject to it without being able to influence a change.
- baandam 4y agoIt is a huge reason why 10+ years of zero interest rates and capital being worthless is a terrible idea. It creates such massive dislocation and waste. Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.