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Amazon's First Job Listing

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87 pointsnicocerdeira54 comments

I feel like I'm missing something. Why would you ever respond to that listing? No meaningful description of the company, no outstanding benefits, just the promise of being overworked?

It's interesting to observe that the person who this language did resonate with is likely a billionaire now.

Survivorship bias is always interesting to observe.

Do you think Amazon survived because of Jeff Bezos or survivorship bias?

Yup you’re missing something.

In addition to attracting qualified candidates, good job listings repel those who don’t agree with them. No one wants to sift through hundreds of applications.

Here’s the main mission filter: “to help pioneer commerce on the Internet.”

technical filter: “you should be able to do so in about one-third the time”

and culture filter: “Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers.”

If you didn’t get these things or why they were important, early Amazon wasn’t for you.

On the other hand, if you saw these lines and said “holy cow this is the future and I want to be a part of this”, then you’d roll the dice and apply.

This style of recruiting isn’t a numbers game and doesn’t appeal to the average person.

Ehh, I think you are making this up and your theory is sound just because Amaz turned out big

I see stuff like this weekly

"blablabla need skilled engineers for my unique brilliant idea company blabla"

Nothing is exciting about this

I feel like a lot of those look like imitations of the concept. I've certainly seen some wording like that which was transparently not relevant to the job.

Now let's have look at similarly-worded ads for the 2000s dotcoms

On the other hand: if no-one ever tried something new, all would be the same always.

“to help pioneer commerce on the Internet.” - In 1994, this would have intrigued me, in 2004 I would view with skepticism, in 2014 I would laugh

“you should be able to do so in about one-third the time” - No matter the era, this kind of language is a big red flag to me - More often than not people who say this have no idea what they're talking about, the kind of people who call themselves "idea men"

“Expect talented, motivated, intense, and interesting co-workers.” - meaningless phrase

I don't know how recruiting messages were in 1994, but unless this is the Velvet Underground of influential recruiting messages (not many people got this email, but those who did started startups of their own) this reads like a generic recruiting email. Given the state of things in 1994 the "pioneer commerce on the Internet" would be interesting enough to learn more though.

As the comment above you pointed out, then this job wasn't for you.

If you made a job add for e.g. the job of an Olympic level swimmer most people would consider the add bonkers, not those who are actually olympic level swimmers.

Believe it or not there is in fact people who can maintain systems in 1/3 of the time most competent people think possible.

There is also people who love the thrill of going as fast as possible and who would prefer this over a more leisurely pace.

Of course the amount of people this applies to is probably less than 1%. But those people are going to really like the job.

As someone who prefers working in fast paced environments and have responded to calls like this in the past, I have found that people who say "I want someone who moves fast" often are really bad at managing and have unrealistic views of how long things take. People who write that phrase might think they have Steve Jobs reality distortion fields, but are mostly deluded. The fact that this particular posting was made by someone who actually walks the walk is not obvious - I don't judge people by what they say but what they do.

All I'm saying is that this would have been mildly intriguing because of the ecommerce angle, which was a new problem at the time, but would require sussing out of the Bezos fellow to see if he's the real deal or deluded. Hindsight is 20/20, but if you were reading this blind in 1994 you wouldn't say "WOW This is an AMAZING OPPORTUNITY!", but, if you were the right person, "Hmm, this could be interesting, I want to hear more". I actually find this pretty interesting and cool that the first call was so banal.

Weird that this read of it is so controversial...

> As someone who prefers working in fast paced environments and have responded to calls like this in the past, I have found that people who say "I want someone who moves fast" often are really bad at managing and have unrealistic views of how long things take. People who write that phrase might think they have Steve Jobs reality distortion fields, but are mostly deluded. The fact that this particular posting was made by someone who actually walks the walk is not obvious - I don't judge people by what they say but what they do.

There is a very fine line between walking the walk and delusional. Amazon employee number 1 was not super fond of Bezos when he left (Shel Kaphan). Amazon employee number 2 lasted less than 2 years. As you point out it is clear after the fact that Bezos walked the walk, but he might also have been delusional depending on your point of view. Any success tends to contain a non-trivial amount of luck. Whether someone is ends up a lunatic or visionary often depends on factors that person doesn't control.

Kaphan also says he loved the first 3 years and then it gradually fell off from there. I have had a similar experience at a previous employment. Point is; startups change dramatically quite often. The same person might transition from bat shit crazy to the opposite (and back) in a rather short timeframe. You certainly can find someone who is just a through and through asshole who have learned to say the right things, but I honestly haven't met very many of them.

Most of them are just trying really hard without knowing what they are doing so they make a lot of mistakes. Managing that sort of person is a skill. Since most founders are in this category its a rather essential one. Not trying to bash the founders, the very definition of a successful startup means that most of the employees are way out of their league. When a start up doubles every year (or faster) then half the company has been there less than a year. They are just getting started and they now have double the reports they had a hear ago. Everything is on fire in both the good and the bad sense. Its just the nature of the game.

> All I'm saying is that this would have been mildly intriguing because of the ecommerce angle, which was a new problem at the time, but would require sussing out of the Bezos fellow to see if he's the real deal or deluded

Totally, you need to do your due diligence :)

> Weird that this read of it is so controversial...

Lately HN has turned into a place that is best personified as 50+ year olds looking for a stable and relaxing gig where they get paid a ton of money to play with technology. Unfortunately I see that this kind of attitude is getting quite mainstream (even among significantly younger engineers). There is nothing wrong with wanting that. I see the appeal. Its just annoying deal with. It is weird that HN which has startup roots are starting to adopt such a posture. After re-reading your post I can see that it wasn't actually the angle you came from it just read very closely to that kind of narrative. You got caught in the crossfire :P

IDK, if someone advertised an AI job like this in 2023, I bet it'd pique some people's interest.

You’re on target.

sama on this:

“want to be stressed, watch some GPUs melt, and have a fun time? good at doing impossible things?

send evidence of exceptional ability to chatgpt-eng@openai.com” [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1630724485828714497?lang=en

That sama tweet is very effective, he's known to be the real deal, his startup is known to have external funding and therefore validating, and the humor shows the work environment.

A real equivalent would be a nobody, with no external funding (first external funding of amazon was 1995), promising equity and requiring a move.

Let's say you got an email 2 years ago from someone you've never heard of saying: "Self-funded startup seeks extremely talented developers to work on AI. You must have experience building large and complex, yet easily maintainable systems, and work in 1/3 time that others say is possible. Top-notch communication skills are required. Familiarity with [the technology you'll be building for] would be helpful but is not necessary. Must be willing to move to Seattle."

Not quite as interesting as sam altmans tweet...

Yeah, it would pique interest, as I said "would be interesting enough to learn more though." - but I'm responding to the comment saying his reaction would be "“holy cow this is the future and I want to be a part of this”, then you’d roll the dice and apply." - which I really don't think so, there's a lot of big talkers and people new to the industry get burnt working for deluded individuals, and there's nothing obvious in the email to indicate if this is real deal or not.

This job is aimed at people who make infrastructure software. I work primarily as an infrastructure SWE and although the community of people who work on such products is bigger than in 1994 it's still pretty niche. To a lot of folks the knowledge you need to have is viewed as esoteric.

The web has spawned off a number of jobs that are abstracted above the system level that require very little deep integration with the system(s). DevOps, web backend devs, web frontend devs, designers, etc all live a layer or two of abstraction above building OS tooling and services that serve as significant a purpose as the webserver. That's to say, he knows who he's talking to.

>Why would you ever respond to that listing?

Good question. Of course in retrospect getting that job would make you one of the all time highest earners in the software industry.

I think it is also quite clever, the only people who would ever respond to this are exactly the people you would want. The core promise here is being able to work on something which might change the world.

my guess is that 1994 was very different and maybe ecommerce sounded way more exciting

It was 1994. There weren't that many jobs for UNIX-oriented C/C++ developers, working on large scale problems for the internet.

In 1994, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 were the most popular desktop operating systems. Most internet access was dial-up. Windows 95 was yet to be released. Steve Jobs was working on NeXT and wouldn't return to Apple for another 3 years. The GNOME project didn't even start until 1997, which is 3 years later. Python 2.0 wouldn't be released for 6 years, in 2000. Heck, Netscape Navigator's first version wasn't even out yet (not for a few months) -- there were no distinctly popular browsers other than, perhaps, Mosaic, released only a year earlier.

No one was building web apps yet; pg started Viaweb in 1995, one year later. Internet commerce was not at all an obvious idea. Very few people were working on "internet companies", and very few people yet were working primarily on UNIX (outside of open source hobbyists). This job posting was appealing to UNIX enthusiasts and academic computer scientists who were hoping to turn their hobbies into a lucrative day job, in a world where 90%+ of "computer jobs" were rudimentary IT schlep.

The entire culture you describe in your comment -- of companies needing to distinguish themselves via strong benefits and mission alignment -- wouldn't grow up for a few years. This wasn't a job posting among a sea of web startup job postings; this was, instead, one of the earliest web startup job postings in a sea of enterprise IT management and DOS/Windows desktop software development postings.

The "competition" for these developers was startup versions of companies like Redhat and Netscape (maybe), of which there were only a handful of comparables. A good documentary you can watch to put yourself more into the mindset of this period of developer history is "Revolution OS" (2001): https://watch.amazon.com/detail?gti=amzn1.dv.gti.cf101954-e0... (Amazon Prime Video) -or- https://imdb.com/title/tt0308808/ (IMDB)

thank you for a great summary.

Great answer, I'd add one more thing: startups used to be much more attractive financially.

In the 90s a big company software job would put food on the table but would not make you particularly well off. Startups, by contrast, would often load you up with equity and have a liquidity event in 2-3 years. Growing up in the bay area during this time I know a lot of programmers who became wealthy during this period by just picking good startups.

Contrast to today where you need to wait a decade to find out if your options are worth anything, and even if the company is worth hundreds of millions you may still get screwed if the founders promised their VCs it'd be worth billions.

What you're missing is that in 1994 the only people who were into these things are the people who would consider this job post a challenge.

Nobody went into that part of IT for money back then. People who did went to IBM, Microsoft and Oracle instead, if they wanted to work in such a nerdy field at all.

>You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.

I wonder if working nights and weekends was a bonus? What's wrong with being competent and putting out a reasonable amount of work and not being overworked and under pressure?

If you listen to the war stories, a large number of other successful tech companies or products like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, the original iPhone, the original Blackberry, the post-iPhone Android, etc. would nove have been successes if everyone had strictly done their 9-5, Mo-Fr.

Success often means racing to get to market with significant lead over your competitors who are also working on solving the same problems you are and are most likely not sticking to the 9-5, mo-fr schedule either. Which is why probably not many market successes came out of Europe where everyone works 40h tops, unless it's their own company/passion project.

I was blown away by how many people in the original iPhone team claimed lost their marriages due to spending so much time grinding to iron out all the last minute issues and get the phone out the door on time. Jensen Huang said in the beginning their team was iterating to ship a new GPU design every 6 months with a tiny team. I bet everything I own they were not doing only 40h weeks back then.

I'm not endorsing this practice, which is why I don't work in start-ups, but succes in this racket for early stage start-ups was often correlated with burning the midnight oil and it seems like a lot of people were willing to make the sacrifice for enough equity in their mission to "change the world" and "make it".

Yea but it's also the reason a ton of start ups fail. I've run the gambit of startups. The biggest reason I've seen them struggle or fail is,

1. Over engineering too early. 2. Making bad decisions because everyone is exhausted and pissed off. 3. Everyone racing to "seize power" rather then focussing on the product or actual customer wins. IE, a bunch of antisocial engineers end up in people leader roles because they are good engineers rather then tech. Leadership.

Number 2 is a serious problem. The things I've had bosses pulling 80 hour weeks say to me and others has been astounding. Like if you wrote them down and showed them to a fifth grader they'd think you were insane.

Maybe then. Right now you can work 30 hours, party and then get bought by another VC operated company.

This is what was missing when Apple and Amazon started and for the last decade this dirty VC business has stifled innovation and made people look only for an exit. That is why the biggest companies in the VC era has been companies like Uber and AirBnb instead of Apple and Amazon.

There's nothing wrong with that, go get a job at any bigco and enjoy decent income at low variability.

OTOH if you put in the same amount of effort as most other people, you'll get the same results as most other people. That was not enough for highly ambitious people like Bezos, so he sought to build a team of other highly ambitious people to take a big bet with.

The people replying to this ad are now multi-millionaires/billionaires. If you want to work a reasonable amount of work you can do it at a normal company, and get a reasonable amount of money in return.

This is just survivor bias.

We all know what survivor bias is. The risk/reward proposition is still attractive to some.

> The people replying to this ad are now multi-millionaires/billionaires.

Quite a few who answered ads just like it worked years below market rate only to see their theoretical equity dissolve, though.

Yeah but we're not talking about those ads, I'm using this ad as an example of why some people might be interested in such a job posting. They knew the risks.

If you play in the shark pool you might get bitten. It might also be incredibly profitable if you know how to navigate it.

If you can't tell whether the company you work for is going somewhere or just using you for cheap labor then that says as much about you as it does about the company. Employment is a two way street.

If you don't want risk, then don't choose risk. But there is nothing inherently wrong with risk.

I don't think the ad is asking for people who are willing to work three times longer hours, it's asking for people who can produce three times the output in the same hours.

Exactly, output is not strictly a return from time spent; plenty of organizational factors as well as individual factors like skill and experience.

A 3x SWE can't produce 3x if they are in 6hrs of meetings a day. Likewise a 1x SWE can't produce 10x even working 12hour days.

Almost 30 years ago, that's insane to think about.

> Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.

I wonder to what that turned out today...

I wonder who got hired.

You are in luck! Amazon employee #2 hangs out on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26006656

EDIT: There’s also an interview of Amazon employee #1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12437322

Wow, thanks. It's why I love HN.

This solves the "fast, cheap, or good; pick two" question.

I wonder who they ended up hiring for this opening. If they see this, maybe they can respond how the job went.

And I hope the person went with the equity ownership and did not settle for a 10% higher salary instead.

I would have gone for a 10% salary increase. :/

Fascinating that he wanted an expert C developer with a PHD who'd build stuff in one third of the time it takes others.

…probably for _one third_ the pay!

Hiring C developers back in the day was smart. It meant someone knew computers as much as they knew software.

Hiring C/C++/Rust devs and retraining (stupefying) them where necessary is prob a lifehack to get top talent without having to sift through 1000s of Js resumes.

That pro-tip has been used on me, I haven't touched them in ages, leaving my C/C++ skills rusty (pun intended).

Nothing wrong with that unless you got Catfished into a role or aren't enjoying your job.

Anyone know who eventually got the job?

Shel Kaphan?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulDavisThe1st apparently.

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