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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

I get why Walmart would buy them, but it seems to me they could have waited 6-12 months and bought the company for $300m. There's just no way they were showing growth. The only thing that makes sense is that Jet would have been damaged goods in 12 months and this was the only option for Walmart to build a millennial friendly competitor to Amazon.

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Why couldn't they show growth?

Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. They've increased their free shipping limit, longer shipments, and kept pushing their deals onto Prime users only.

I've bought more from Jet.com this year than Amazon in the last two years and Jet was faster with its free 2 day shipping than Amazon's free shipping.

I just moved from the UK to the US. It is quite surprising how useless Amazon just became for me.

So far, every item I wanted to buy has $49 min spend for free shipping attached to it, which is not something I have had to deal with - except for a few add-on items.

So I just switched to eBay sellers instead.

I realize the price may end up being similar but I want to know what that price is while browsing, not "add $5.99" at checkout.

> Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users.

But the number of non-prime users is also dropping.... so Amazon doesn't really care that much.

There could be an opportunity for a competitor depending on how some Amazon issue play out over the next year or so. A lot of commentors are focused on the tech (which makes sense, being HN and all), but Amazon has some issues with counterfeit products, unequal product commingling, and unreliable third-party sellers.

Right now those issues are mostly side-line grumpling, but I could imagine a few big incidents could possibly blow up into a substantial reputation issue. The unknown, of course, is can/will Walmart do any better.

They're not just buying a pile of code. They're also buying an energized and engaged team that they hope will be able to modernize Walmart's ecommerce systems. They wouldn't have gotten that if they had purchased a broken failure of a company somewhere down the road.

Doesn't Walmart already have pretty decent tech? I recall seeing some impressive scalability blog posts from the team st "Walmart labs."

Not compared to Amazon.

Funnily enough, Walmart Labs was the result of an acquisition.

Yeah Walmart labs is quite progressive. They're very active in the clojure community and do some interesting work.

As far as I know, Walmart labs is active in nodejs, front end and instrumentation. That's cool and all, but Jet knows how to build a lot more difficult things than that, like personalization, promotion planning, pricing strategies, etc.

(Throw away for obvious reasons)

It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales.

We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers.

The few smart people left here are super excited to jump over to Jet ASAP.

I hear they moved their back end to Node on Black Friday last year. If true that's damn impressive right? Unless it was a facade.

The node.js front end is on its second complete rewrite in the last 2 years, and a huge source of the scaling issues. Almost all the backend is still in Java.

An army of below average engineers working in a language with no compile time type checking is a guaranteed recipe for writing unmaintainable code that needs to be constantly rewritten.

Absolutely nothing scales

Maybe that is the réal reason Doug bought it.

From your perspective is .com able to grow (handle growth) from tech. Stand point??

https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?

We have close to 2,000 of them, and maybe 100-200 I would consider proficient in any type of technical role.

There was a massive push to hire as many developers as possible, so recruiting extended offers to everyone that applied. Senior engineers who have no degree or have ever worked at a tech company before.

I have no problem working with people who are capable of doing the work we need them to do.

Isn't that a problem with the recruiting dept ? and not generally with the Indians ? If the recruiters are not doing a good job, why blame your coworkers ?

Seems unlikely that America would import "no degree" Indians to work in tech

You don't understand big company politics. Number of reports determines whether a person is a manager, senior manager, or director and makes $120k, $170k, or $350k. The main metric of how good a manager is is simply butts in seat. Actually doing stuff doesn't matter.

The group in that photo seems like a pretty diverse bunch to me...

For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.

Ya, the thing is they probably couldn't. Not really. It's not just about money. Think about how many big companies (including WalMart!) have plenty of money but don't have the internal talent or culture to really drive change and innovate in ways they never have before. Companies are funny things. A lot of the time they can do what they can do and really just can't do what they can't do no matter how much money they throw at the problem. Sometimes (though definitely not always!) an acquisition can really help.

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