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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

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

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(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...

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

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

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.

Not compared to Amazon.

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