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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

The thing to keep in mind is that they have competitors still eating their lunch while running 40+ year-old COBOL backends which have their IS departments tearing their hair out regularly.

It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack. I work for one of their competitors, and I'd kill for their tech stack. But ultimately their business revolves around a bunch of professional logisticians and customs brokers being able to execute reliably and effectively, and all tech can do is enable this. I wonder if they realize this.

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They should have just used all their funding to buy a controlling stake in Maersk instead.

Ocean freight is only one piece of the puzzle. A big one, but air is generally more lucrative. Ocean moves lots of mundane everyday predictable crap. Air moves crap that has to be there RIGHT NOW.

I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?

The problem IMO is scaling the logistics side of the house. No one cares how cool your tech is unless/until you can move shit from Point A to Point B at scale, and handle the same big problems as, an Expeditors, UPS Global Logistics, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, or DSV Panalpina.

> Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people.

I have worked as a software engineer in Operations in Amazon for years, and this even if this is true, it is not all positive.

What it meant for us is that instead of developing a solution we developed small disconnected projects here and there, that all required slightly different maintenance, different technology to build, etc.

This was a problem technically but also personally as there was nothing meaty enough for a promotion, and most projects were incredibly boring "I want a dashboard to show metric X".

> It's as if the efficacy of a business isn't completely positively correlated with the coolness of its tech stack.

Hard reality to acknowledge by an industry that takes the term 'software is eating the world' at face value.

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