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Comment by aorloff | Hacker News Reader

I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke

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Funny you mention, I'm actually working on that, too. There's an internal career portal with a large variety of backend jobs. No interviews, follow-ups, or anything yet.

Home Depot is a chain, so the backend is probably being handled from some R&D center somewhere. Your maneuvering area at the local home depot is probably pretty slim.

Back in the early 2000's I did consulting work with Home Depot's backend developers. Their office is the "store support center", which is in the NW suburbs of Atlanta. I remember the team as being very good, but surprisingly small.

These things tend to corellate :)

I've worked with a vendor listing products in their IDM (Item Data Management) System. IIRC, it's from https://www.stibosystems.com/ . From a SMB vendor supplying one type of product it's frustrating to work with, with a lot of back and forth and workflows for verifying all manner of compliance with data quality, global regulations, and laws. From their internal perspective, it's probably the bee's knees, supporting a wide variety of taxonomies, considering the variety of products they sell & support, some rather dangerous and hazardous.

From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.

I worked for Home Depot's Canadian division up until last year when they laid me off. They do everything in-house out of Atlanta for US operations.

>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.

>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week

And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".

I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.

Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.

I don't think that's an appropriate conclusion to draw from a single point of data.

I think it's still a mostly correct conclusion. Pretty much everywhere you look across services, they've been cooked to their bones. Have you noticed that supermarkets seem to have, like, 1/5th the employees they did before? Since when is 1 open lane on a Saturday night and a 30 minute wait acceptable?

Well, since we've accepted it. Everything kind of sucks and barely works, but it doesn't matter, because we ultimately put up with it.

Yes but in construction the real order flow is delivery, which is why Home Depot bought GMS

And for that, around here they are my second or third call after FBM or MacArthur

~~~Problems on purpose because they don't spend the time to fix it IE not going to hire anyone to fix shit because they still make billions this broken way~~~~

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