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?
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.
I see stuff like this weekly
"blablabla need skilled engineers for my unique brilliant idea company blabla"
Nothing is exciting about this
“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.
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.
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...
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
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
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.