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Comment by pritambaral | Hacker News Reader

> Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay

I'm sorry, but those are not "high-profile projects of Amazon". Some things in the AWS roster are.

Prime Video and Prime Music are shoddy technical work. The former refuses to play movies on HD on Linux, and their technical support has no idea why, instead spouting bullshit like "Oh, Adobe Flash does not support Linux". The latter launched in India exclusively on Flash, and that was this year. Their current HTML5 music player locks up one of my CPUs even when nothing's playing, by making the browser constantly refresh the whole layout.

If your objective was to claim Amazon's Bangalore office put out good work, Prime Video and Prime Music are poor examples.

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It's amazing to see how some people seem to be sitting on a high horse here and thinking that a HTML5 music player issue is somehow indicative of the work going on behind the scenes.

Granted there are issues in Prime (Which software does not? Either people bitch about a software product or nobody uses it) but the context of the discussion here was comparison between the likes of Amazon and the likes of Cognizant. Tell me which Cognizant or Wipro can execute something like Prime Video in Bangalore and take it to market like Amazon has with even half as much quality?

What is the alternative you are hinting at? That someone should not work for Amazon and work on developing and improving their Prime product just because it has got issues and instead go develop a AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?

Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees? Because developing something like Amazon Prime at the scale Amazon works at is hard. There are people who enjoy working on such hard problems even if the solution is not perfect.

Calm your horses (sorry, couldn't resist).

I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else. My only comment was on how Prime is not a "high-profile" project at Amazon.

You brush aside the issues I mention as "all software has issues". My point was to show the quality of the product, unlike the actually good technical products that Amazon has, not that the product has issues.

You seem to be emphasizing the distinction between the backend service and the frontend players. Given that Amazon owns AWS, I'd go out on a limb here and say building the backend they already have is not a challenge. I'd also like to point out that a poor technical product built by the Amazon Bangalore doesn't reflect well on Amazon Bangalore, and the frontends are indeed poor technical products.

> AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?

I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole.

> Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees?

Making no claims about the relative skill-levels of Amazon and Cognizant employees, I must argue, from first-hand experience with clients' tech teams, the notion of 'higher pay must mean higher skill' is wrong, especially in the Indian IT sector.

"I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else."

You are missing an important context of the discussion then.

No matter what complex software working at large scale one comes up for an example, one can find problems with it. Every software has at least one problem that makes it a deal-breaker for at least one person. Even Linux, which is so popular in the tech world. These problems more often occur due to priorities than due to dearth of engineering competence.

But these issues are orthogonal to the context of discussion. What you said about Prime's quality may be correct but irrelevant in the context of this discussion.

"I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole"

Perhaps you can provide some examples then?

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