hi i worked at goodreads and this comment is giving me gell mann amnesia.

ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply fly by night company. the way software was written and product cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.

the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the company accrued pre acquisition.

amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished building their competitor to it that was in progress. either would have been more successful what they did.