Amazon Academy India
academy.amazon.in
academy.amazon.in
1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time.
2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.
3. get data / insight / early access to top level test takers and build a recruiting funnel before these students start college.
When I worked for Sybase there was following brain drain pipeline from India office:
* Hire a bunch of people.
* Move brightest and hardest working to U.S. on H1B.
* Use that PR to hire a bunch more people in India.
I haven't worked for FAANG but I've certainly seen a lot of India tech jobs hired by American companies that I wouldn't consider "low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with".
Of course, I haven't seen the details of whether it's an effective tool or not, but as a free service that can only improve and scale over time .. should be a gamechanger.
(For those outside India who are not aware of the exam that the academy is targeted at, its for admission to a collection of premier Engineering schools in the country. The exam is taken by over 1 million students annually, with a ~ 1% acceptance rate. There is a huge cottage industry of paid 'tutorial classes' and online programs to help students succeed in the exam.)
I'm not sure "cottage" industry is the right characterisation. It's worth over 2B$ [1], and has existed for over a decade. There are behemoths like Byjus, Kota, FIITJEE, etc. and innumerable informal options.
1. https://inc42.com/datalab/with-the-largest-share-of-funding-...
GP's comment is more about mushrooming of tutorials/tuition centers on every nook and corner for IIT JEE prep, similar to any cottage industry.
I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen the varied abilities of their elementary school teachers makes me think a top-flight online course could do much better than some of the actual people working at their school.
There's no question the best teachers will outperform the best online content. But what are your odds of hiring the best teachers?
Yes.
> I'm going through this with my (young) children and coronavirus. Having seen...
No. Trust me. You will regret putting your child(ren) through online education. It sucks. I've tried it partially for 2 years. My friend is doing it now, preparing for JEE.
Preparing for JEE is not easy. I had hopes of getting in after getting a good score in the 1st Mains attempt, but just gave up during covid lockdown.
Social interaction is very very important.
Just trust me. I have nothing else to say. Not really interested in going through my 2 year ordeal in this comment.
Don't put your child in online edu in India. especially not JEE prep
You obviously aren't an average Indian parent (uses HN). So you might choose online for your kid. I'm just warning you.
Maybe india needs more "premier engineering schools" if the acceptance rate is so low. Harvard and MIT have acceptance rates near 5%.
I assume there are a lot of kids who simply won't bother applying to MIT and Harvard just because they know they aren't going to be competitive. But it sounds like the IIT entrance exam is almost mandatory (and used by other colleges?).
The acceptance rate is not a "real" metric in the way that, say, the acceleration due to gravity is a quantity you can measure. Harvard and MIT do not have acceptance rates near 5%. They have an admission quota. If fewer people apply, more of those people are accepted. If more people apply, fewer of those people are accepted.
The reason for high acceptance numbers is that people perceive they are not Harvard/MIT material, and act on that knowledge by not applying to Harvard/MIT. Applicants need to clear a threshold well above the 95th percentile; the selectivity number is an illusion.
You <- Manager/PMs <- VP <- SVP <- Bezos or C-level.
Usually a manager runs a 2-10 person team who they advocate for, and a few PMs interact with the teams that work on the projects they oversee. The PMs are sort of like sales in a traditional company, customer-facing roles who prioritize and occasionally promise features.
There are usually enough VPs that you can meet with one if you have an idea that your peers like, and the support of a VP seems to be enough to let a small team work on a tangent for a year or two.
It sounds a lot like how Google develops new products, because it's surprisingly easy to turn a working proof-of-concept into a public-facing product or service. So why don't they suffer from the product-killing disease that plagues Google?
I don't know, but I have a couple ideas:
* Amazon throws people and money at things that work. Products like Lambda and Alexa used to be small upstarts with modest expectations, but when they sold well, the company invested heavily in them.
* Amazon promotes people based on peer feedback and manager recommendations. It's an easy system to game, and there's a bit of graft as teams defend likeable underperformers since they stopped leaning so heavily on "rank-and-yank" performance reviews. But it also means that you can get promoted for maintenance, like "X prepared our retail service for holiday traffic, and we didn't lose millions in sales when it didn't crash."
I'm not sure how applicable their management structure is to most organizations, though. They can tolerate massive loss-leaders because they have a couple of money printers, and they re-invest most of that money in the company rather than sitting on it or paying it out in dividends. People tend to like working there if they can cope with a bit of stress, and I saw as many people leave the company as I saw take internal transfers during my time there, so "tribal knowledge" also fades more slowly despite the churn.
There's layers and layers of management. There were 12 people between me and Bezos.
Unlike Google, peer feedback is a lot less important at Amazon. Promotions and PIPs are solely based on your manager. If you have a great relationship with your manager, you're fine.
If you don't see something, answer me this: why don't they do anything like this in the US?