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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.

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That’s most major tech companies at this point. The fun was building closer to the mvp of the core product. Once that’s done, it’s just corporate druggery with computers.

Yeah, most of the things in IT are just in maintenance mode now.

You need way way less people for that.

Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build.

I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel".

Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.

working in a warehouse, just recently built over the last 4 years, and the pallet management is done via excel. im pretty sure the scanner app is just a frontend.

horrified to think the totes are done the same way.

Doing work that helps another team will rarely result in getting any credit and is a great way to get stuck in the bottom of the stack rank (top grading or whatever they call it now). So automating anything that integrates across the org chart won't happen because the incentive structure is against it.

That's not true. In fact OP1 and OP2 [1] in Amazon are in majority an intake process for projects requested by other teams. I'd say only half of them come from the team itself.

[1] https://docbarraiser.com/annual-business-planning-what-the-o...

Last few drops of efficiency out of the aws stone scales to millions of dollars of savings potentially.

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