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I've always thought of Amazon as a company whose primary product was their own stock. They had a great model-- their terms with vendors were such that they of
by MCRed 12y ago
I've always thought of Amazon as a company whose primary product was their own stock. They had a great model-- their terms with vendors were such that they often had the customers cash for weeks before they had to pay the vendor.
When I worked there the emphasis was always on new press releases. So they created many silly things that never stuck-- like Amazon catalog shopping: They took paper catalogs from other retailers, sent them to the phillipenes to be scanned and then hosted them. Amazon movie times. Amazon local restaurant menus. All of these are now gone.
I worked on the product search engine, and for laughs I like to go back and check the regressions that we worked on during my time there. About 9 months after I left, a key one came back... and it's still there many years later.
I think this is because they simply disbanded the search team. I'm sure it's been since reformulated and disbanded several times. But the regressions in question, by the way, we had automated tests for. We tested for them before we pushed code.... I think those tests have been lost in the chaos.
Amazon was constantly reorganizing.. and products (software products) would get abandoned because the team would be dissipated.
They were also very poorly managed for a "Tech" company. My boss had trained to be a prison guard-- I kid you not-- his degree was in criminal justice. By the time I left, %80 of the team had left for other positions. His boss was one of those old school middle managers who you would expect to be running the DMV. Neither of them were technical- their skills extended to managing email and spreadsheets.
And yet the stock has continued to rise, even on little or no profits.
They're great at selling stock-- look at the P/E ratio.
- sillysaurus3 12y agoIt's alarming how consistent HN comments are regarding working at Amazon: management is dysfunctional. Might Amazon secretly be one of the worst famous large tech companies to work for?
- kyllo 12y agoI've heard from several ex-Amazon employees that average employee tenure is less than a year and a half. That is not a good sign.
- sytelus 12y agoAccording to the book "The Everything Store", Amazon employees pay for the parking ($20-30 per day). Coffee machines are ancient varieties but it's better than past when employees also had to pay for coffee. You get the desk that is downright cheapest possible thing you can get. And so on... If you are wondering how Amazon can attract any talent at all, the answer is that 70% staff is college hires that were promised significant stock. The caveat is that it doesn't even start getting vested until after 3rd year. Most of the hires leaves in about 2 year (attrition rate is being rumored as much as 70%). So their secret is feeding the growth engine on huge swaths of college hires that can be lured for stock options in distant futures with expectation that they will just leave before vesting starts. Well, I do love Amazon. One thing they have got absolutely right is obsessing about customers. Everything starts with customers, period.
- RyJones 12y agoYour parking is off by at least a factor of two, even more if you buy a pass.
- port98 12y agoAt least for Obidos $20/day, $13 with pass, $8 with pass + reimbursement. The pass wait list is, what 9 months now? You'll probably be in a new building by the time you get it.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- CalRobert 12y agoWhy should parking be free? I have always ridden a bike or taken transit to work; I don't see why I should be subsidizing other people's parking. My previous two jobs both paid you not to use parking (which is effectively charging for parking, in a way), and I was grateful for it. Now I work in a city center and it's taken for granted you won't be driving.
- Danieru 12y ago
- room271 12y agoI'm genuinely curious about this, and I don't know anyone who works at Amazon, but if they really do have such a bad work environment and low tenure then how are they managing to consistently produce such good products (I'm thinking primarily of AWS here)?
- funkyy 12y agoAWS is bit different story/department. But hey - Amazon has probably one of the ugliest and most unreadable website from all cloud providers imo...
- lmm 12y agoI love pointing out Amazon to histrionic designers. If the content is good - and Amazon's is - then design is very much secondary.
- facepalm 12y agoI suspect all companies are poorly managed. If you can tell me about (big) companies that are managed well, I'd like to hear about them. My experience with big companies has always been surprise that they get anything done at all. But maybe that is the secret of big companies, they get stuff done because they are so big that all the waste is swamped by all the manpower.
- MCRed 12y agoI've worked for Microsoft and with Apple. Both of those companies have areas where things are "poor" or very frustrating. But comparing Microsoft to Amazon, is like night and day. Microsoft was much better managed-- still it might well qualify as "poorly managed" by your yardstick. So I guess I'm saying there are degrees of poor.
- gaadd33 12y agoDoesn't Microsoft have a culture of NIH inside each product group? Resulting in things like ClearType (I think it was) taking years to get actually implemented since it didn't come from the "right" person/product group?
- crucifiction 12y agoI have no idea where you worked in Amazon, I am guessing you did not. Having worked there for years in software, there were exactly ZERO technical managers I met that were not either previous software engineers or technical project managers (e.g. CS degree). That is of hundreds at all levels, including VPs and most SVPs. Reorganization tends to happen at the VP level and is less overall than Google or MSFT in cycle length and size of disruption. All of the "silly things" are Amazon giving people freedom to innovate. Not all of them stick. The alternative is to never do anything.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoMy boss had trained to be a prison guard-- I kid you not Hmm. Wonder if I know him. When I was getting my master's in Software Engineering, one of my classmates was an ex-prison guard.
- robomartin 12y agoI've been trying to understand Amazon product search. I wonder if you might be open to having a conversation about this off list.