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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

No you don’t. If you did, you would be subject to lock outs. The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

Amazon for instance has over 1 million employees. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured

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> The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

They know the clients, the contracts, hiring, cost cutting way before the general public does. The problem is that many BigTech is sum of many units which might not be correlated, but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from.

And this is again an obviously naive assumption. Your average developer at Apple has no idea how many iPhones Apple sold in China. Nor do Nvidia employees they know how many GPUs NVidia sold. Your random Amazon developer didn’t know Jassy was going to announce at the earnings call that Amazon was going to announce that they were going to spend more this year on Capex for AI related hardware than they’d free cash flow tanking their stock.

Again, I worked at AWS and we had no insider knowledge

> Your average developer at Apple has no idea how many iPhones Apple sold in China.

But if anyone is connected to few friends across team, they would know they are hiring for China sales team(or dependent team like internal tooling for sales etc.) aggressively or firing them.

As large as any big tech company is and as a silo’d few employees have friends across teams. Besides that, at every tech company, all information like that is a need to know and isn’t shared with “friends” - especially information that can move markets.

I don't know if you ever worked on big tech? Everyone knows this through gossips, referrals, friends of friends etc. The hard part is to figure out how actionable this information is.

> information that can move markets.

That's the hardest part to figure out. Stocks aren't very correlated with anything. Slight changes in this quarter's iPhone sales in China doesn't move the share price very much if it is within range of expectation.

Yes I have.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622584

I have worked at Amazon. I can guarantee you that no one on the Amazon Retail side had any clue what went on at AWS or vice versa.

Do you think that any of the rank and file knew that Jassy was going to announce mass layoffs or that Amazon was going to spend so much on Capex for AI that the stock would go down?

> but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from

Isn't Apple pretty famously secretive even internally around stuff like product launches? I would expect a company that runs a tight ship to have rank-and-file employees who would have less potentially actionable info than ones at companies that don't control information as well.

In a tiny company this is true. In any medium (much less large) company you don't know much more than anyone else on the street - and the independent analysts who just watch public information closely usually know more than you do about all that. (it is their job to read the data from China and figure out what that means for the companies involved).

> The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

Huh? We're not talking about the custodial staff.

> Amazon for instance has over 1 million customers. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured

This is a hilarious example; especially at Amazon, "rank and file" employees are privy to $100M+ AWS deals, they have to implement them after all.

I worked for AWS in Professional Services (full time blue badge employee). Part of “sales”. Even when we talked internally asking for advice from the service teams (the people who worked on the various AWS services) or even internally within ProServe outside the project team, when we spoke on Slack, we didn’t mention the customers in Slack channels outside of a need to know basis and used the acronym “IHAC” (I have a customer) when referring to the customer.

I assure you the random developer on the EC2 service team for instance knew nothing about the sales deals.

Also a “$100 million dollar sales deal” is nothingburger for AWS not enough to move the market.

Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?

> Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?

Hmm, no?

As a solutions architect at Amazon I was very much a "rank and file" employee, and privy to large deals, so I'm not sure what you're on about. I haven't heard of Professional Services, presumably you guys had different responsibilities.

So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sell its own internal consulting services?

https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/

But either way, it’s monumentally a kind of weird statement to think that anyone besides “janitors” would know anything about the deals that would go through or to think a “$100 million sales deal” would move the needle especially as we see right now that AMZN is tanking because they reported they will spend more than all of their free cash flow on CAPEX for AI. You couldn’t have predicted that

> So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sale its own internal consulting services?

Not sure I understand the value proposition here, but then again Amazon is known for having redundant teams every now and again.

SAs are not allowed to give the customer code or actually do anything. When a customer signs a contract (SOW) with ProServe, they are billable consultants who actually do implementations. Even they can’t touch production workloads and basically do everything in non production environments and teach the customer hope to do the work and move it into production

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