Disclaimer:I work at Amazon as a dev manager.<p>Working at Amazon does mean that you need to work hard, long and smart. There is a lot of technical debt to deal with too. But the technical debt did not come from bad design, but from the way business grows and changes. There is a 20% growth YoY. Inventories run into millions of products across multiple warehouses. We ship through multiple means and we ensure the product shipped reaches the customer on the promised date at over 95% of the time.<p>In real life, this means that you are going to have trade-offs and some of the trade-offs do turn into technical debt. What we do with the debt is more important and amongst my groups, we are decreasing the debt by leaps and bounds.<p>If you want to see how it is, give me a shout. We are hiring, as usual :) I can take resumes in any format too :)
Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence.<p>In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with...<p>In fact, ever-increasing engineering costs would be just as indicative of mounting technical debt as it would of an increasing commitment to R&D.
Investors want higher margins but obviously Amazon is investing substantially in itself. So far, though, Bezos seems to be winning the tug of war. Many analysts are glad to see higher revenue and feel that Amazon is cementing its position at the top of the ecommerce world. AMZN shares are up over 5% despite the earnings miss.
Its funny how people seem to be whining about Amazon.<p>In fact Amazon is one of the best places in terms of innovation. In addition to having a strong core business, they also have AWS, kindle, android app store.<p>Who cares if their legacy codebase is 40 milllions lines of C++ and not your hip Ruby or LIPS nonsense. The truth is that they get work done. AWS is one of the best cloud computing system out there. Nothing else comes even closer. Dropbox, Heroku and Reddit all rely on them.
Who cares if they take resume in word format, they pay well.<p>Its sad to see HN turning into a language fanboi and apple fanboi club.<p>The AWS EC2 outage did not even affect 0.01% of their revenue.
<i>The end result of all this behind-the-scenes software? Fast, accurate search results that help you find what you want.</i><p>Has Bezos ever actually used Amazon's search functionality?<p>I know it isn't the easiest problem in the world to solve, but their search is by far the worst of any of the major shopping sites that I use on a regular basis.
This is only slightly on-topic, but regarding the service-oriented architecture that he mentions at the beginning of the article, how would one implement this internal? Specifically, how would you communicate with your internal services? Just an HTTP API? Is that fast enough? Another thing I'm wondering is what's the best way to handle internal authentication between your frontend and some backend service for example? Sorry if this is too specific for this discussion, but I've just always wondered this and I figure that HN knows.
Interesting how AMZN jumps 5% after missing earnings, yet GOOG drops nearly 10% with nearly the exact same results (increased hiring and expenses resulting in lower than expected profit).
$AMZN stock is flying right now: <a href="http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AMZN</a>
I wish the company would reveal some information on the internal systems he outlined in his letter. Amazon's architecture is impressive and its infrastructure teams build great stuff to help developers get their work done & deployed.<p>Exposing these things would be a powerful recruiting tool.
This is instructive. Google's stock might not have tanked as hard the other week if LP had come out and placated the street with some jargon like this, re: Google's also ballooning expenses.