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Comment by s4vi0r | Hacker News Reader

Unless Amazon really fucks something up, Walmart will never be able to attract the tech talent that Amazon does. Nobody wants to work for Walmart.

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FWIW, this is definitely not what I hear from my network. Amazon has a reputation as a high-variance but usually bad place to be as a tech worker, while people love Walmart Labs.

FWIW I have heard the same thing.

I interviewed there a year ago, at least to me it looked like they were absorbed (or at least parts of the Labs team I spoke to) into Walmart e-commerce. Five excruciating 1-hour rounds where we ran out of anything to talk about because they refused to ask me any coding or architecture or CS fundamental-related questions.

What? They refused to ask CS related questions? Did you discern a reason why?

Well it's not like I asked them and they refused to ask me any questions. 3/5 people asked me "what happens when you boot a VM in openstack", which was a kind-of-shitty question because I can know the answer from just looking at a picture in the docs. More than that, I went in expecting a grilling interview (because Walmart Labs) and it was a huge anti-climax. I wasn't hugely impressed by the people that interviewed me too, except for one guy who has now left.

As to discerning a reason, no clue. At least 2 of them were competent coders, so no idea why they never asked me anything.

You might want to double check that those people still have a job: http://fortune.com/2017/01/26/walmart-layoffs-ecommerce/

I was hearing similar stories until the current CTO took over. From that I've heard some fairly negative takes.

Dang, that sucks. Thanks for the update.

> Unless Amazon really fucks something up, Walmart will never be able to attract the tech talent that Amazon does. Nobody wants to work for Walmart.

Disclaimer: I am probably biased because I used to work for Amazon

I'm not sure I agree with that. Amazon already has such a poor reputation but they don't seem to have any trouble attracting people to work there. Considering the turnover* there, the fact they are able to grow this quickly must mean there are ways to get people to join despite having a poor reputation.

Walmart Labs on the other hand has a good reputation so you could even argue that if Walmart plays its cards right, it actually has an advantage in that aspect of attracting tech talent. I mean they even use Clojure..

* I admit this is anecdotal but I live in Seattle and used to work there and the average tenure is fairly low from what I've seen.

And we use F# at Jet.com!

They're doing some interesting things on the front-end web front. Electrode in particular and some surrounding libraries look pretty cool. https://github.com/walmartlabs/electrode I had the same reaction when I had heard of Walmart Labs. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss.

Why not? Amazon is fairly widely known to treat its employees, on average, poorly. While much smaller, I haven't heard many bad things about Walmart Labs.

Most Don't distinguish walmart labs from walmart and walmart treats its employees pretty terribly.

It wasn't that long ago that a regional manager forced people to work off the clock and walmart lost a major suit against minimum wage employees. Even though other store managers and walmart executives scrambled to tighten rules, enforce already present rules and denounce that one manager, their image was already tainted. Stuff like that sticks with the public consciousness for decades.

Walmart is catching up to Amazon on tech, Amazon is catching up to Walmart on reputation

What about Walmart Labs? From what I understand there are some talented folks over there.

While there are still a reasonable number of very talented engineers at Labs, having talent is sort of meaningless if you stifle their ability to actually ship (which Walmart at large does very well).

Walmart Labs isn't their main IT/dev division though - aren't they more like what Bell Labs was to AT&T?

This is true. For instance, until recently (I think), Joshua Schachter (@joshu) of del.icio.us fame worked for them.

Did you seriously just suggest that Amazon is generally regarded as a pleasant place to work? Amazon, the company that not 3 months ago, had an employee attempt to kill himself by jumping off of one of their buildings after being put on an "employee improvement plan" [1].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-attempted-sui...

I don't think the tech talent is what drives Amazon's success as much as you imply.

I already have a strong distaste for Amazon and have been using Newegg where possible.

Same here. I've been looking at every other vendor that I can before Amazon.

So far I've had success with finding other vendors. I've been using Target, Walmart, third party retailers, the manufacturer, and AliExpress as an alternative. Heck I've been shopping locally more.

Besides Walmart laid off 200 people from their E-commerce division. At best they hire for some off-the-shelf IT skills.

Walmart back end and Walmart labs are completely different, just like Amazon's Lab126, A9, and web site are completely different.

However I don't know that many people who are/were happy at 126, while to my surprise everyone I've met who works at Walmart labs seems happy with it.

(not much of a wal mart customer, BTW)

Walmart labs is may be a little more 'technical' than current Walmart IT. From what I see on their website, it is developing bunch of Javascript frameworks etc. Nothing wrong with that but it is not comparable to likes of Amazon.

Hapi came out of Walmart Labs, which is the pristine example of how to execute an OSS project.

Hapi's primary author and only maintainer left Walmart labs, took Hapi with him, severed ties to Walmart and has publicly proclaimed his dislike of the new CTO of Walmart.

His own words: https://twitter.com/eranhammer/status/824006905253089280

Nobody wants to work for one of the best known names in logistics? Really?

Of course they will get people who fit in their pay scale. It is like on HN where European lifestyle is superior in every way but when it comes to money most people are like "Oh shit only 1/3-1/2 salary compared to US, so not moving there"

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