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Comment by drieddust | Hacker News Reader

> Here’s a story from the early days of Amazon Web Services: Before writing any code, engineers spent 18 months contemplating and writing documents on how best to serve the customer. Amazon believes this is the fastest way to work—thinking deeply about what the customer needs before executing on that rigorously refined vision.

Good luck explaining this to the new age Scrum certified gurus who wants to complete all design work in 2 weeks of sprint 0.

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Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

> 18 months

That's either an utter lie or one very specific research project not performed by the "engineers".

The linked article spells out exactly what project it was about:

> Take AWS. It reached $10 billion in revenue in less than four years. But what's remarkable is that they didn't get there by forming a team, writing a lot of code, and then testing and iterating. In fact, it took more than 18 months before the engineers actually started to write code. Instead, they spent that time thinking deeply about the customers they were trying to serve and forming a clear vision for what AWS should be

Yeah, unless they mean some other Amazon than the one that believes in "2 > 0" in product portfolio management and that "communication between teams is terrible!" (a quote attributed to Jeff Bezos).

Granted I don't know the context of the given quote, but I definitely agree with at least one interpretation of it. If you need communication and synchronization between teams to achieve your goal, there's a lot more room for missing memos, misunderstanding etc. In that sense indeed, communication between teams is terrible in the sense that it adds extra drag to the whole process. Of course, there's ways to spin this quote in a number of other ways too, which is why I think the quote without any additional context doesn't really illustrate any one point.

I don't know how to reconcile this with my view of amazon.

"the customer" to amazon is not only the customer buying products, but the "other customer" paying for search results. The interests of the two are in opposite directions. I wonder if they have some sort of laffer curve.

This is more an AWS thing, I imagine, where the business is providing the client with cloud computing resources in a secure and efficient manner. That at least seems to be a straightforward goal (although I wonder about how their billing really works under the hood, I imagine there are ways to push customers into more expensive tiers than they really need).

Amazon, the warehouse & shipping outfit, is riven with conflicting interests and is probably something of a nightmare to work as a dev at because of that. Current legislation exposes this:

> "The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would stop sites including Amazon and Google from giving their own products a leg up in search results. (NYPost Jun 2022)"

Also, consider the people responsible for Amazon's "Time on Task" warehouse worker monitoring system... kind of sadistic at best.

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