The True Story of the Amazon Door-Desk
blog.glennf.com
blog.glennf.com
One thing I do remember distinctly about Glenn's time in the catalog department was this terrifying 60k Perl script I inherited from him called sitecounts.pl. This script examined all the various catalogs (books, reviews, etc) and attempted to generate some interesting stats about them. One day it just broke, and since it was used in the catalog build process to verify that things were sane, it needed to get fixed pronto. The code was plenty confusing, but what was the worst part was the extent of the right margin creep, I'm talking 150+ character lines -- not exactly easy reading on my crappy 15" X-terminal. I felt like a character in a HP Lovecraft story, slowly descending into madness as I learned more about the horrors of this script.
I ended up maintaining and adding to this script my entire first stint at Amazon. Eventually as I added features and changed things, it slowly got made sane over time, save for a little bit of madness that I kept in there just so I'd have a reminder of what it was like.
Ah the 90s. Good times.
I wonder how much of Perl's reputation is based on these kinds of formative experiences. I love Perl, but I'm realizing that everyone had their nemesis in sitecounts.pl, or traffic_reports.pl, or partnerpayments.pl, or wtf-how-did-this-ever-work.pl, and unfortunately didn't draw the same conclusions about Perl that I did.
It's like it triggers some primitive release of testosterone which results in developers competing to fit the most functionality in one regex filled line of craziness. Hilarious to watch. Hell to debug.
It's scripts like these that spawned the meme of replacing people with scripts; because that's what these massive scripts did: automated away entire departments, or negated the need to hire for a department all together. Which is important when you're a two man company and all of a sudden you've discovered you need to process $100k of credit card transactions from yesterday, and you better get started on it because there's already another $300k in transactions generated today. It's only one script, so there's no need for revision control. Damn, there's only one guy working on it, it can run out of his home directory. And of course, it was so successful, successfully a blackbox, he's asked to automate some other task, which is only related because there's some slight dependency, and, well, it's a dependency, so let's just put it in the same script we already run. Rinse, repeat.
Were these scripts terrible? Of course. But they were the work horses of the Internet and any company with two CPUs to rub together in the 90s. There's a reason that "perl is the duct tape of the Internet" was a saying in the mid- to late- 90s: because it was.
These scripts work perfectly fine if the person who wrote them and fully understand them runs them, yet inexplicably fall apart when someone who didn't write them run them (similar to [0]). These scripts can smell the fear of the new guy put in charge to maintain them. This is where heisenbugs roost and schroedinbugs become the stuff nightmares are made of, despite that they had most likely been running without issue for months or years since the guy who wrote them left.
[0] "Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine" http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171
Don't blame the boy.
(And remember, he was raised by wolves. Yeoowww!)
In fifteen or twenty years we'll be reading rants from people who had to cut their teeth on some overly designed, needlessly abstracted, difficult-to-build-all the-dependencies-for rails app.
It's cyclical.
Note that I'm referring to the first or second edition (maybe the third); I understand that the fourth edition is just recently out.
TIMTOWTDI
If folks have enough programming experience with other languages, it's easy to write Perl that looks more like those other languages, but unfortunately the moment a developer gets overworked or wants to show off (opposite extremes, really), Perl can devolve faster than some other languages because so many tricks are possible when vigilance is not maintained.
I've had decent success with making one-class-per-file with MooseX::Declare and Method::Signatures::Simple, but you really have to have a good code review process and rock solid developers to make it happen.
I don't think it's the languages fault, as this can happen just as quick in (say) Ruby code, and you can write extremely bad code in any language. Those other languages tend to be slightly faster to develop in though, as you can forget all of the need to write things like "my" and the reference syntax. Things like Python and Java have some resistance to "having fun with syntax games", but fall into other traps where interesting syntax (or architecture games) become fun or quick shortcuts.
On one end, part of Perl's problem is not Perl at all, just that it was historically the first thing people learned after Bash, and often those folks really didn't learn to program yet. On the other end, it is easy to go crazy with it.
(There is also a skill level issue; regexes are much easier to understand than parser generators, so a lot of people try to implement a parser with regexes.)
Good to see the tradition continues. Remember this is write to do stuff everyone knows on the team.
I love to read other programmer's battle stories! (I am currently reading "Coders at Work" and really enjoying it).
Thanks for sharing!
Addressing some of the other comments; Perl and the Perl community itself is so far removed from macho ... its still one of the kindest, most intelligent and beneficial public communities online .... if someone feels emasculated by just reading someone's code; don't mistake that for the original coder's intent was to emasculate.
Perl is the programming language that I would want with me if the world was coming to an end (asteroids of course) and somehow I could help save it with getting the damn lasers to work to blow up the asteroids ... if it takes a 150 char regex then so be it.
I was an intern at Tellme, which used door-desks early employees had to build themselves. I built a desk in pretty much the same style as the Tellme desks (although structurally more sound… I can jump up and down on mine thanks to an extra 2x4), which were based on the Amazon desks.
My desk, which I have used since 2003, is a 30" x 80" x 1-3/8" hollow core white door, on four cut to order 27.5" 4x4's from Home Depot. It cost less than $50 to make and is a very nice desk. It took me less than two hours to build, from leaving my house to driving to Home Depot to building the final product.
My next desk will be a built-to-order sit-stand adjustable desk, but that's because I'm currently able to earn enough money (and am concerned enough about my health) to justify the cost. If I were still 23 and concerned about costs, I'd build a desk identical to my current one in a heartbeat.
Basically everything Amazon says is exactly the kind of lie that the door desk is-- it sounds plausible and in other contexts it could be true, but in reality, it is a lie.
Sure, the work sounded interesting and the people seemed competent and friendly, but the view of an open floor plan filled with those desks really dampened any excitement I had about working there.
Sadly I was told that only senior VP's and up could have door desks. Maybe in 20 years :)
Space that you can't easily reach is essentially useless. My desk mostly exists to take up space between the wall and my monitor so my legs have somewhere to stretch out to.
Haven't had the heart to tell them I'd prefer a door.
Also with adjustable chairs I've never really felt the need for adjustable desks. We'll see how that works out for me in a few years though I guess. ;)
The door desk is a badge of achievement. You feel like you have beaten the system - you got a "desk" for a price of the door. It's similar with many other DIY solutions - the inconvenience does not matter. What matters is that you did it yourself.
Plus, in some companies, I imagine it might mark you as a member of an inner circle of door-deskers.
There was a recent post on HN about a startup in Seattle spending loads of time to build door desks, an apparent attempt to emulate Amazon. Perhaps purchasing ergonomic desks for a reasonable price and no time sink would be a better strategy than these clunkers.
My variant is to lay two 2x4s across either two filing cabinets or sawhorses, then put two 2'x4' sheets of 5/8" or 3/4" MDF on top of the studs. Cheap[1], toolless[2], and portable[2]. My current variant is a little more elaborate, since I wanted a corner desk, but fundamentally the same architecture.
[1] The sawhorse version costs less than $50 [2] Nothing is attached
1. The metal reinforcement underneath the tabletop, around the perimeter, would interfere if you wanted to install a keyboard tray.
2. The collapsible diagonal metal struts that reinforce the legs reduce the usable space underneath the table somewhat. You may not be able to fit a filing cabinet (or small rack, or tower PC with hard drives on top, etc) under a folding desk near either end, because of the struts.
I suppose there is a positive in the pride of workmanship and if someone is handy and feels like doing this - have at it. The monetary savings don't seem worthwhile. If they exist, they are purely symbolic - at least for a company that can afford to pay rent.
http://www.officemax.com/office-furniture/tables/folding-tab...
http://www.staples.com/Staples-8-Folding-Melamine-Banquet-Ta...
These worked fine as long as you didn't poke holes in them, but at first they were a little unstable, since the doors would slide around no top of the filing cabinets. At some point, somebody had the idea of putting some of the Thinking Putty we had sitting around the office on top of the filing cabinets, and that kept the doors from sliding.
This is considerably more frugal, in my view, than the solid-core doors with metal brackets to attach the legs. Lightweight, easy to move, easy to disassemble (the Thinking Putty stained the wood with its oil but didn't get stuck itself), lots of storage space in the drawers, etc.
If anyone wants a great cheap desk (around $250 delivered), I recommend the Hon AM3060:
https://www.google.com/search?q=hon+am3060
These things are extremely sturdy with no sideways wobble at all. They are adjustable height and have adjustable feet for uneven floors. I've had a couple of them for years and think they're great.
Unfortunately, Hon seems to have discontinued them. The only model I see in stock anywhere is the AM3060ZZP with a mahogany colored top. I have the AM3060ML with a light oak color top, and there was also one with a gray top. (All the tops are a laminate.)
There also used to be an AM3048 and an AM3072, but I don't see those anywhere. (The model numbers indicate the top size: 30x48, 30x60, 30x72.)
http://hairpinlegs.com/products.php?id=5
It's the most sturdy desk I've ever used. There is no wobble and I'm sure you could easily stand a few people up on it.
Those legs aren't super-cheap, so it's not the least expensive desk you could build, but it's very strong and looks pretty nice.
They're not. Actually, neither is my Ikea desk at home, for that matter.
A well-built door desk has the legs braces on two axes (note: not all of them are correctly built) and the legs are really quite substantial. I'm a fan of the "giant table as desk" school of office furniture selection, so I actually rather like my door desk. It's one of the only things supplied by Amazon that I didn't feel the need to eliminate or replace out of pocket.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60111123/
I've only got one of the small shelves on mine (which holds my three monitors) and it holds up fine: http://db.tt/GhnkSwjI
On the negative is an unwillingness to learn from the previous generation. They've made a lot of mistakes we shouldn't.
On the positive is a willingness to say "screw the establishment". We are going down a path that leads to a better place.
In the end, I think we need less establishment and more better places. We should recognize where we came from, but not get stuck idolizing it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=darushimo
Sorry everybody else isn't doing a better job of building a website custom-tailored to exactly your desire.
The less happy side of the symbol: that amazon really didn't care about employees was reinforced in other ways as well. A common refrain from Jeff: if you're not happy here, leave. Life is too short to be unhappy.
In some senses that's a bold answer, and an honest one. But note that the answer was very, very rarely: what can we do to make life better here?
The door desks were also a symbol to us all that if you wanted to work at a place that cared about your health, well-being, and happiness, you might very well want to move on.
But, to be fair, three counterbalancing factors held people there: hard engineering problems, the very real prospect of wealth, and working on a product that was very, very successful. I never heard Bezos give anyone the sugar water speech: he didn't have to. It was obvious that Amazon was changing the world.