what is a bar raiser?
and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.
and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.
I think Amazon has taken on an outsized image to many people that just isn't true. We have good engineers in many organizations, but we don't pay enough, have the right strategy, or take care of individuals well enough to lure the kind of great folks you find at other big tech companies. In many ways, Amazon is a retailer that does technology because it found a way to make money from it. The DNA is still MBAs/finance and retail.
Bottom line is Amazon is a product culture not an engineering culture and that makes it really easy to leave for Google or unicorns that really appreciate tech debt tradeoffs.
I love the Amazon customer service. They’ve managed to crack a difficult problem and execute enough that other Giants haven’t come close to it yet.
GCP and Azure tail AWS by quite a bit. Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.
So Amazon can do a lot of things wrong, but I’d have to say they get the important parts right.
Not even particularly close. Amazon doesn't even have a majority of online sales, although it's getting close. They seem like a much bigger force than they are because of growth.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...
They got some parts right, some parts awfully wrong, and some are just irrelevant now. They make money, they are cheap + convenient, and that usually what people focus on. They are not sophisticated, they are not great designers, etc.
Its true Amazon has some great engineers but is not a very engineering centric. I remember a senior engineer in Retail once comparing it to a plumbing system kept together with bandages.
In simple terms, bar raisers are current Amazon employees that come in during the interview process to analyse candidates. They do this alongside their own full-time job, assessing as many as 10 candidates a week and spending 2-3 hours on each one.
In other words 20-30 hours per week on top of the full-time job? That doesn't sound quite right.
10 candidates in a week may happen at some kind of event, but then it isn’t 2-3 hours per candidate, and in that case you’d effectively be taking a couple of days off from your normal job.
A PM who has never opened an IDE in his or her life and who is only familiar with “coding” concepts through Wikipedia. They read books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb and majored in one of the humanities. When they’re shown the webpage that the geeks created which loads in 2 seconds, they tell the lead developer that they want the loading time cut down to 1 second and the font to be changed.