Amazon has had a lot of success in online retail, cloud (AWS), Alexa etc etc. In fact Amazon Engineering is top notch. How come they are able to build such great products if the engineering culture is so bad ? Help me understand the paradox, please.
Company success at the Amazon level is more luck than engineering skill.
Not true at all.
Believe the sweat shop Infosys person. They seem to have such deep insight.
Who said that the engineering culture is bad?
Amazon is very successful due to its strong adherence to leadership principles and visionary leadership. A few vocal ones might constantly complain about the culture but the majority is happy with the work culture at Amazon. With LPs as a bedrock, Amazon constantly innovates and stays ahead of the competition. Amazon will next disrupt the healthcare industry with Pillpack.
It's successful because there is no competition (Retail) and some areas it entered before other companies (AWS, Alexa) and at this point it is too big to defeat starting from scratch. Most of the success you see is due to being first in the market. Amazon is miserably failing at anything new it tries to do. It's culture is not allowing it to succeed at new products. Amazon Restaurants could not compete with smaller companies. Alexa is a financial failure. There are a lot of products I can't talk about but know we're cancelled because of the culture here.
Alexa has been such a huge success, seems like. I know, Lab126 the subsidiary that makes it in Sunnyvale and Cupertino has huge orgs + Seattle also has huge orgs devoted to Alexa. Every 3-4 days on LinkedIn I see Alexa this, Alexa that, posts. Lots of job openings in Lab126. Not sure, whats going on.
Yeah internally Alexa is crazily messed up. Alexa teams are known as some of the worst teams to work for, I haven't worked for them but have dealt with them and it wasn't good. It hasn't delivered anything big since it's launch 2015.
Because Amazon builds it's products and services by working backwards from the customer problem and not forward with "brilliant" engineering thinking or another "amazing" technology to build.
Monopoly of market or lack of efficient competitors also contributes to Amazon success
Coz Amazon doesn't care if anything is engineered well. They'll just scrap anything and get first to the market. Then they will hire bunch of decent engineers from tier 3 companies to maintain and add features to it . If you can't handle it. It's PIP land baby.
Agree, we launch things, get them fast moving, no matter what. Business wants a launch just do it, will improve tech stack in phases after launch with funding. Many teams are there with tier-1 configuration systems, just sitting on top of it with a number of sev-2 every week. One will launch with scrap tech, gets promoted, other will improve tech stack, gets promoted
It’s simple, customer obsessed culture. We start from the customer and work backwards, Customers love amazon. The only way to survive at Amazon is deliver results and there is very high pressure to do so in a short amount time. The culture/promos comp structure all of it is designed for churn.
Nice point
Insightful
This. And what people on blind/fang/bay area think is that strong engineering is the secret sauce to the success of these tech companies. It’s not. It’s focusing on the business needs and doing what needs to be done to deliver value. This is why google continues to lag behind fb Apple and amazon in core areas. Google thinks it can engineer it’s way into a competitive market, when in reality strong engineering is almost a commodity at this point (excluding hard research areas where google still leads).
Every year amazon pips 5% of the employees. Every year these 5% of the employees are the most vocal group on the blind.
And 5 likes
I had to unlike to keep it at 5