Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_leachim | Hacker News Reader

What category is Amazon? (the marketplace). It looks like a third category (company sells something else, but it has a software component supporting it).

I am asking because I am working in a company with similar business model and I am trying to figure out what category does my work belong to.

thank you.

EDIT: fix msg

View on HN

I think there is nuance here, even within a product company, not all software is equal. There's software to support core business (think ads in Google) and there's probably software to support internal dashboards (also in Google), I'm sure engineers working in ads in Google have much more leverage than those working in making dashboards for ops or some internal ticketing system. Conversely, I'm sure the companies we traditionally think software is just needed to support the core business also have software lines which generate income or is critical to their core business.

thank you, maybe it is easier to understand

when you ask whether business will halt and die if the system you are responsible for is down or suddenly absent

it is going to be a mild inconvenience.

I think, defined like this makes it less ambiguous

edit: fix msg

> when you ask whether business will halt and die if the system you are responsible for is down or suddenly absent

This is a great way to put it.

I also ask myself the question: "who are the rockstars" at a company. The folks that are celebrated.

If it isn't a developer/engineer, you aren't at a category 2 company.

thank you, I've got something to think about.

this is a good way of putting it, thanks, it is also a good way of assessing ones one value to a company (if i disappear tomorrow, will it mostly be a minor inconvenience or will there be a DEFCON 1 response raised)

These categories are nowhere as cut and dry as HN seems to often think. Netflix is an even better example than Amazon. Infrastructure and delivery is certainly somewhat of a competitive advantage, but their product is not software at all. They're a media company, a production studio, a distributor. People like Shonda Rhimes are the true superstars and they get $500 million contracts that reflect that. It doesn't mean you can't have an extremely rewarding, well-compensated career as an engineer there, but you're still not Chris Hemsworth. You're not what their users really care about. Without content, there is nothing to sell, no matter how strong the software is.

Then you have something like a Raytheon. They're a far purer "technology" company than any FAANG other than Apple. Hardware and software is literally all they sell. No ads, no media, no communities. But very few of the products made there are owned by the company. They're made on behalf of third-party buyers, usually the US military, which puts you in category 3 according to this kind of breakdown, but that is extremely misleading. You're not a cost center. The pay tends to be lower compared to silicon valley standards because of government acquisition laws and the huge number of hiring constraints that have nothing to do with technical excellence, but you're still the primary value creator and the military program you're working for will treat you that way. This one is arguably even weirder because the actual "product" of the military is war and the superstars are the soldiers, pilots, line officers. Technology developers are always in a support role, but that isn't any different from working for Apple or Microsoft. Whoever is actually using those products isn't deriving value simply from using a computer. They're doing real world work with it and that work is what they really care about. Technology is always an enabler. Nonetheless, technology developers for the military make a lot more money and have far easier jobs than even a four-star general, so which role do you really want?

100% second this, thank you

it is hard to say almost 99% product is not engineering but what it enables company to do. In a sense this division is psychological: either company cares about engineering and makes it a priority or it doesn't.

I think good proxy would be tooling which company uses, niche languages like Clojure/Erlang, open source activity, well known people in decision making positions rather than specific business type.

Amazon is unique. If you look at their revenue, the vast majority comes from E-Commerce. But if you look at their profits, the majority comes from AWS.

AWS is indisputably a software org, so it's clear that their senior leaders value software engineering. But I think that even Amazon's marketplace sees itself as a software org. From the early days, they always saw software as being a competitive advantage.

I agree that AWS is a software org, I am interested in E-Commerce in this particular case. Thank you for response

You can definitely tell the difference in priorities for end users between Amazon.com and AWS too.

Amazon is a partial monopoly so it depends on where you're working. Your team could be any of the 3 areas mentioned under the same umbrella.

Honestly a good manager will do more for your job than anything else.

Over the years, Amazon has gone more and more in the direction of the software being the product.

As an immense e-commerce site, the software enabling all the sales was the key differentiator to the competition.

Then they brought in external sellers, making the e-commerce platform more directly a product.

Then of course they started selling the infrastructure directly as a product, as AWS. Which of course relies on software to automate the provisioning, operation, and monitoring of those computing resources.

thank you, so it more dependent not on a type of company but on how the company runs itself.

It can have its main product not in software, but it can bet on R&D in order to outrun their competition.

And the other way around is true too, that is how you get bad software products which somehow always stays afloat because of exclusive focus on sales.

I agree that AWS is indeed a software product, this one is obvious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com