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10/13/11 Hacker News | Steve's Google Platform rant

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Steve's Google Platform rant (google.com)1045 points by tRAS 1 day ago | 337 comments

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pitdesi 20 hours ago | link

It now 404's so I've posted it here:

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thingthat struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforcedalmost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's asweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably ahundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google issuperior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point butLegal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed byhaving teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despitevarious efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really haveSREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding -though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charityor helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there,except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent ondecor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due tolocal competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- theyjust try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster,with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nicepublish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have abunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. Wewouldn't take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of threethings Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is alsosomething they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early overeverything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turnsout to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in themarketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political,philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retailsite. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respectedhuman-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thingLarry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these bigusability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that



frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packedpixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all stillthere, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah,they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to setthe context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in allseriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon.He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs thecompany" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Exceptwithout the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makesordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramblelike ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- backaround 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so hugeand eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peerbonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no directreads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The onlycommunication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn'tmatter. Bezos doesn't care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to beexternalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface todevelopers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a littlejoke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs tooversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell.Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO atWal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was awalking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forwardprogress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture.They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existingdocumentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as tellingIndiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot ofdiscoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:

- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls beforethe real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, itcan be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metricsand reporting.

- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can makeany real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every singleservice.

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. Butwhen your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing stillfunctioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, overand out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you haveto make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing



comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it'sindistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.

- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code viathese services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism.And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. SoAmazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) aboutevery service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.

- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unlessthere is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.

That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like thesethat Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizingservices, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trusteach other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced.From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally intoa company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to howthey approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of dayexternally.

At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it'spretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do servicesbecause they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros andcons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thingbecause SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bitabout the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detailwhatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. ButBezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.

You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmableplatform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shippingbooks and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now theyhave the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the AmazonRelational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com.These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personalfavorite of the bunch.

The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Teslermight have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamnwebsite. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter,because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbinglydaunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes andconcentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.

I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one productand have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formalname for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in thecomputing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're notalone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: peoplefor whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to youyet. It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind ordeaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- or idea-ware for thatmatter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of themessaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by theunbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful



Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdyare the two ever at odds.

But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibilityto zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you areasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled withamusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never getthis little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.

That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. Wedon't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear tome over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft andAmazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universalservices. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon didit: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. Thereare a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all,ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access totheir data and computations. Most of them think they're building products. And a stubby service is apretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell mewhich ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby'sgreat, but it's like parts when you need a car.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product willalways be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highestlevels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leafworkers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your OwnDogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last Ichecked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about itwhen they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." Imean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess thejoke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culturefor a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doingthat is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are allabout long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notionthat Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they aresuccessful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowingother people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their timeon Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands ofdifferent high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need somegames. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see howincredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people wantand deliver it for them.

You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, overthe entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them.We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn'tneed to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces andworkflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to doit, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, becauseyeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't



get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. Aplatform is accessibility.

So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't"get" much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth ofhaving started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learningin this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen itbefore, prepare to be amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands,and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can't designfor squat, but at least they're doing it.

Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It'sembarrassing. We don't have any of that stuff.

Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly aroundtheir mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty gooddogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since timeimmemorial.

Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write thisthing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant inGoogle+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you reallydo want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be prettyeasy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention,uncomfortable as it might be.

After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (Ididn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com andbrowse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if hewere doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be buildingif all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to geteven this much available externally. They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DOget platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is atbest platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.

I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish.Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. Andthe APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not evengood organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves.

And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only offenders. This is a culturalthing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformersfighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.

Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externallyprogrammable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and Iknow GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it becauseit's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan MicrosoftOffice programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll neverbe competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting anyresource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet rightnow, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unlovedto me.

Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something aplatform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- thatis, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the FacebookPlatform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have beenanywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated asyou do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. Idid start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doingeverything right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's



because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines.They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, andbelieve you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, ornaivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no perfectproduct for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about anaffront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsightedall my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selectionbecomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrometeam is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quitebrazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visitfor the rest of your life.

It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product Company through andthrough. We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wildsuccess has biased us.

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand theneed for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think ofa way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could bemonetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it.

Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Productand they rode that success pretty far. So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to aplatform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old)things like Mafia Wars could come along.

Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What are they missing?"

The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us tostart catching up. We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't doexternal ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company: the PMs don'tget it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individualsdo, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deckemergency. We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautifulextensible platforms later. We've tried that and it's not working.

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform,and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- askanyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. Ifyou delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. Youcan't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. Youneed to solve the hard problems up front.

I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much everything I came here to saytoday. This post has been six years in the making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if Imisrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff andit just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I'm sorry.

But we've gotta start doing this right.

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pitdesi 18 hours ago | link

For all those who are criticizing this public posting, first note that it is publicly available inseveral dozen other locations, including some tech rags. More importantly, STEVE HIMSELFSAID IT'S OK TO REPOST -https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...

Part of me feels that this is actually written to the general public, and the whole public/privatething is a cover up.

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Lewisham 17 hours ago | link

Part of me feels that this is actually written to the general public, and the wholepublic/private thing is a cover up.

This is highly unlikely. This sort of internal conversation happens a lot internally.There's no need to take it public. What would it serve? Some sort of escalation of theproblem? Unlikely. It's more likely to get you a stern email than it is to get it heard.

Steve has no problems getting the ears of developers. I can't see why he would wantto make it public.

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frossie 13 hours ago | link

There's no need to take it public. What would it serve?

Well I can speculate: Because some issues seem like real debates when youhave them internally, and then you tell a bunch of outsiders and they go "uh,it's a no-brainer" and that tells you something you didn't know before: that youcan't see the wood for the trees.

The thing that surprised me most about the OP is that Google actually sees itselfas a product company. With the exception of search and maps (and perhaps noteven search so much now) they actually aren't strong with their products, and(aside from the gargantuan scaling issues that they have to solve) they don'tgive the impression of working to improve their products. How much has gmailevolved over the years? Calendar? Reader? Sure, for all I know they are alltinkering furiously under the hood, but that is not what the outside worldexpects from somebody positioned as a product company.

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anigbrowl 14 hours ago | link

Thanks for reposting. It's a testament to Google's flat-seeming corporate culture that teammembers are encouraged to speak their mind so frankly.

The key paragraph for me is this one: Any teams that have successfully internalized thenotion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up areunderdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in thatdirection. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture.Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programmingplatform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitivewith Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resourcelove. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet rightnow, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks prettyunloved to me.

This is my perennial Google grumble in a more elegantly stated nutshell: Google is a magicalplayground of wonderful things, few of which are finished. It's magical because the parts thatwork do so at great speed and with almost spookily good results. It's maddening becausesome things are automagically interoperable and others are head-deskingly separate orincomplete. The main thing I use Google Docs for is word processing, and though it's great tohave stuff in the cloud it's just absurd - absurd - that when I move to an Android device theUI is unavailable, or that the full UI lacks support for things like user-defined text styles.

Thing is, Docs owuld be fine if I was just using it for a personal journal or some glorifiednotepad. But now that I'm a student again, I'm writing letters and model legal briefs andthings like that, and it's just a pain in the ass for that, so every day I flirt with reinstalling MSOffice...2003. The stuff I need to do was all in Office >10 years ago, and I would even put upwith Clippy again just to have things like outlining, styles and templates.

Steve Yegge should get a seat on the board, pronto.

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Jun8 18 hours ago | link

Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an



ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that hegives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture.

But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms,"Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it forEverything." You can't just bolt it on later." Start with the platform. This is so obvious, yet alot of middle and higher managers ignore this either because (i) they are totally ignorant (seePeter's Principle), sadly the case that I usually face, (ii) they pragmatically ignore it, becausethey are doing greedy optimization for the next 6mos-year and developing the platform is justa "waste of time", or (iii) they ignore developing and making available the platforms theyalready have because they think it's their "competitive advantage".

The way I read his post, Google's case seems to be (iii). They have great internal tools andplatforms for many years now, why they wouldn't develop good APIs around these and makethem available is a mystery to me. Wouldn't they have eaten AWS for lunch if they platform-atized their Map-Reduce tools, say around 2004?

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nostrademons 15 hours ago | link

It's not that. The procedure for open-sourcing Google-owned code is very easy: you e-mail Chris DiBona and he almost always says yes. There've been a bunch of majorpieces of the Google infrastructure open-sourced (eg. cTemplate, Closure, ProtocolBuffers, Guice).

The problem is really technical. Because of the open codebase and "edit anything"culture, basically every piece of infrastructure at Google, unless it was designed at thestart for open-sourcing, has dependencies on every other piece of infrastructure.Untangling them takes far more time than you could 20% on. That's why you don'tsee more open-source platforms from Google.

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lamnk 14 hours ago | link

Ugh, I think you are mistaking between open source and being a platform here.A platform need not to be open source.

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But all the same issues apply, i.e. if you can't disentangle your code fromproprietary interfaces enough to open-source it, you probably will not beable to put a service API on it that third-party programmers will be able touse without a lot of handholding. (And Google doesn't do handholding, asjust about everyone knows by now.)

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lamnk 10 hours ago | link

No, it's not the same issues. I'm not a programmer, but I knowthat offering a well designed API to a service has nothing to dowith its code being closed or not.

When I was learning to program, I was very interested in 3Google's core products API: Search, Adsense and Adwords but gotturned off because their APIs are very crippled. I understand thatGoogle do not want to expose their core products (cash cows) toabuse, however that's exactly what Steve argued in parent'squote. If the closeness (nothing to do with code) is already inGoogle's mindset, how do they become a "platform orientedcompany"? Steve says that it will take a dramatic cultural changeto catch up. Steve also chooses Amazon's example to prove: whenthe years of explosive growth were over, Jeff Bezos had to think ofsome new expansion strategies. He was betting on the cloud,whatever that means, or on being a platform, and he implementedhis vision with an iron fist, because paradigm shift is hard, youhave to consistently push people into doing it.



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SoftwareMaven 11 hours ago | link

I would call that very dangerous and very likely a premature optimization. Nobodycares you are a platform until they use your product, and if you spend all your timebuilding a platform, there will be no product to use.

The path requires far more finese than "always create a platform". You need to balanceover-engineering with the ability to re-evaluate previous decisions.

I agree Google has wandered far off this path, but imnot sure they are on any morewell defined path than Yahoo. They just happen to be earlier.

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skaphan 11 hours ago | link

But ... in the one case we are aware of, of a whole company, Amazon, using a serviceoriented architecture, they did it after the fact. The did bolt it on later, or rather, they(according to Steve) ripped everything up and re-did it in this way. I'm sure it wasabsolute hell to do this, but that is what they apparently did. So it isn't a requirementto build a platform first, then build everything else. It might be nicer to do it that way,if it's the best prioritization of resources at the time, but that's not what happened inthe case being discussed.

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debaserab2 15 hours ago | link

I agree with you in principal but I think practically this isn't always possible.

Sometimes you don't know if a product is worth being an entire platform until it's beenthoroughly field tested. It's too expensive to assume that everything is.

Perhaps in Google's case there could have been more foresight, though.

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ChuckMcM 15 hours ago | link

Steve and I overlapped at Google and I've always felt his missives were pretty clear andactionable. (unlike some which were simply 'this sucks') That this one made it outside the'plex is probably a mistake, I hope he doesn't pay to high a price for that.

Of course there is the risk that he might get something changed inside of Google (I'mthinking unlikely) it would be a pretty amazing thing if the Google infrastructure was availableas a platform (and no AppEngine does not count)

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brlewis 19 hours ago | link

He deliberately took it down:https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/bwJ7kAEL...

See my comment on that post for why I think his taking it down was a mistake.

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outside1234 19 hours ago | link

I suspect he meant this only for internal Google consumption. These sorts of rantshappened all the time but this one is very good and very right on.

He probably proved the accessibility point by the simple fact that he accidentally postedit with his personal and not corporate account.

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monochromatic 18 hours ago | link

I haven't read this whole thing yet, but based on length, I am willing to assume it's a faithfulreproduction of something Steve Yegge wrote.

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asnyder 12 hours ago | link

While the above might be true, I know that Amazon excels at customer service whereasgoogle's is essentially non-existent. So from the customer perspective, I would chooseAmazon over google any day.

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notatoad 9 hours ago | link

do you give google money? if not, you're not a customer and have probably neverexperienced their customer service or a "customer perspective".

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JezChatfield 36 minutes ago | link

I'm a multiple paying customer. I use Google Apps, AdWords. I can't use GooglePlus under the same ID as Apps, because Google appear to think that payingcustomers are less valuable than free users. And we (Apps Users) went for ageswithout any explanation other than "we're working on it".

To do any work using AdWords and Google Apps and Google Analytics, andWebmaster Tools I end up using three accounts and two browsers.

If Google did Platforms, then the first one to fix is "who the F* am I?"(Authentication and Access Control) and make it get used everywhere.

Hell, Google can't even work out what to name things. So you get scammersexploiting Google.com naming to convince marks that the scammer really worksfor Google. This is also a Platform issue - Google.com should be for Google stuff -not abusable to allow, for example, spoofing a search results page so you canclaim that Google has given you special access to modify search results (oneSEO scam that I keep encountering). Non-Google stuff should be on anidentifiable domain, which will eventually permeate user consciousness as being"not Google content".

I speak as a pure outsider and consumer of Google stuff. But I'm sufficientlyvexed by Google Apps/Accounts/Profiles to want to lose the paid for services asmuch and as soon as possible. I get better (or no worse) treated when I don'tbuy. :)

And Stephen's point about Google arrogance - yes, I think Google is arrogant. Iwas an AdWords Help Forum Top Contributor until Google decided that smallbusinesses should only receive AdWords support from other users, not Google.That's seriously annoying. I stopped contributing when it became clear thatGoogle thought small businesses should be denied any customer service - youreally can't have third parties answering questions about why Google isn'taccepting a specific credit card, or even why a specific disapproval has been givenin an account you can't see. That was pure arrogance - dumping on volunteersand crapping on small businesses. I'm told it's different now but I still have sucha bad taste in my mouth from the experience I don't want to get involved again.Google can be arrogant, 100%.

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johnyzee 3 hours ago | link

I give Amazon money for AWS and no customer support in sight.

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frwololo 8 hours ago | link

Unless you're constantly blocking ads, you're a google customer and you givethem money. Don't be fooled by an apparently "free" service :)

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noblethrasher 8 hours ago | link

Viewing ads makes you the product not the customer.

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nl 6 hours ago | link

There is a thing called a "multi-sided market".

Saying "you are the product not the customer" is not onlypopularist, but wrong.

Think about Skype - most of their customers don't pay, but theyderive value FROM Skype - AND they add value to the payingcustomers.

Simplifying complicated markets with statements like "you are theproduct not the customer" is a disservice to the discussion.

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calibraxis 3 hours ago | link

I've worked with a number of tech/advertising corporations.The parent poster is right. The real product is eyeballs, andthe customer is another corporation called the advertiser.

For example, The New York Times offers some value to theowners of those eyeballs, but note how they work: they layout the advertising first, then what's left is what they callthe "news hole" and they put some stuff there. The newshole lets them farm the eyeballs. (The ripe juicyprofessional-managerial variety.)

This is not something programmers like to think about, sothey tend to wear ideological blinders. They don't simplyobserve the money flow: who is buying and who is selling?The eyeball owners are not participating in a markettransaction as either buyer or seller. Their attention is theproduct.

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nl 20 minutes ago | link

To say "eyeballs are the product" simplifies this toomuch.

Think of sports teams - advertisers pay their salaries,but when they are performing on the sports fieldadvertisers are irrellevant.

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ksolanki 8 hours ago | link

This is what I am taking home:

1) There IS no perfect product for everyone.

2) Making something a platform has some chance of addressing the above.

Me trying to make sense of it, but meanwhile let me say it aloud again. There IS no perfectproduct for everyone. Thanks, Stevey.

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VonLipwig 19 hours ago | link

He took it down for a reason. I can't help but feel reposting it is bad online etiquette

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Cushman 18 hours ago | link

Who downvoted this? We should probably have a real conversation about it.

Personally, I'd like to think that if I posted an essay or especially a rant that I laterthought was a mistake, and decided to retract it, other hackers would respect my



decision and not reproduce it. Sure, it's still cached somewhere, and assholes on 4chanwill repost it just to fuck with me. If you really want to, you can probably find a copy.But I'd like to think that our community is classier than to spread it arounddeliberately, knowing it's something I'd rather not put my name to.

What's the benefit to the community the other way, aside from voyeurism?

replyredstripe 18 hours ago | link

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe youshouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt

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Cushman 12 hours ago | link

Uh... Wrong-headed as that notion is, it's also talking way past me. Howdo you see it as relevant to what I said?

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cobrausn 12 hours ago | link

We approve of this comment.

Sincerely,

DHS, CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, and the DEA.

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wazoox 13 hours ago | link

> What's the benefit to the community the other way, aside from voyeurism?

It's one of those fantastic, really wonderful Stevey's rants, on a par with "theemacs problem". I'm really incredibly happy to have had a chance to read it. Soyes, it's probably bad etiquette, but OTOH will it hurt Google in any way?Certainly not. So, hey, thanks for the mistake M. Yegge, and continue the goodwork.

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bdr 15 hours ago | link

Thank you for rescuing this. It has great engineering wisdom and historical value.

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option1138 9 hours ago | link

We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because wedidn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They'reinferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

I LOL'd when I read this. How ironically arrogant.

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teja1990 17 hours ago | link

Its out of context, but please bear with me. Is it ok if amazon has an internallibrary(hypothetical) that is a collection of all its online books that they sell, can they haveaccess to it , i mean normal guys have to pay for just getting a chapter out of a big book. ForAmazon guys is there any concession , can they check on some cool book just like that?

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GryMor 14 hours ago | link

That is not the sort of library he is talking about, I, unfortunately, may not give details,but rest assured that is not what is being referred to, at all.

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0x12 19 hours ago | link

Posting a link to a web based copy is one thing, copying the text integral to HN is probably not



ok.

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danssig 17 hours ago | link

I only got down the first few paragraphs but it sounds like most of the complaints are "retailvs tech company" stuff. Retail has razor-thin margins so of course they will all be cheap ashell. If you think Amazon is bad, try working for Walmart HQ.

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rahoulb 14 hours ago | link

you should read the rest of it - it's not about amazon's working conditions, it's about amistake that google is making.

(btw i didn't downvote you)

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nirvana 1 day ago | link

I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when LarryTessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon istrue, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had.I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in themost gut wrenchingly painful way you could imagine. (Though by far most of my experiences werepositive.)

Amazon was a purely political environment where, if you weren't watching your back you'd getstabbed and become a rung in someone else's ladder. In our group, the manager had zeroengineering experience (literally had gone to college to be a prison guard, somehow ended up"managing" programmers, though barely computer literate.) In fact, it was so bad that when I'dfinally had enough, and quit[1] (because my transfer to the AWS team was blocked by the prisonguard) I vowed never to work for anyone else, ever again. Which means, I had to do a startup.

Anyway, the SOA effort was in full swing when I was there. It was a pain, and it was a messbecause every team did things differently and every API was different and based on differentassumptions and written in a different language.

But I want to correct the misperception that this lead to AWS. It didn't. S3 was written by its ownteam, from scratch. At the time I was at Amazon, working on the retail site, none of Amazon.comwas running on AWS. I know, when AWS was announced, with great fanfare, they said "the servicesthat power Amazon.com can now power your business!" or words to that effect. This was a flat outlie. The only thing they shared was data centers and a standard hardware configuration. Even by thetime I left, when AWS was running full steam ahead (and probably running Reddit already), none ofAmazon.com was running on AWS, except for a few, small, experimental and relatively new projects.I'm sure more of it has been adopted now, but AWS was always a separate team (and a bettermanaged one, from what I could see.)

Regarding Bezos's micromanagement: I do remember, one fall, in the run up to christmas, surfacingan issue with the site several times. My manager told me that his boss didn't want to change it, butI knew it was a bug. I went above his bosses head and told that guy (who was a Bezos report) aboutit. I even cced Bezos on an email about it, and of course, the VP chewed out his underling whochewed out his boss, who chewed out me.

Then, at 3AM, the night before I was supposed to fly out to visit my parents for thanksgiving at10AM, I was awakened[2] and made to fix the problem. The problem I'd wanted to fix 2-3 monthsearlier. The problem I'd gotten chewed out for trying to surface but been told "won't fix" all the wayup and down the chain of command. Because Bezos had gone to buy something on the site and hadseen the problem himself. So, my thanksgiving trip was ruined, of course, and I had to do it- RIGHTTHAT MINUTE- in the middle of the night.

The icing? After fixing it and going back to bed, and coming in the next day (which was a vacationday, mind you, as I was supposed to fly that day...) I got chewed out by my boss for coming in at10am.

I don't know about you, but if you get woken up at 3am and spend 2 hours coding, you should beallowed to show up for work the next morning at 10am.



Bezos was right that it needed to be fixed. However, he must be a B player because his direct reportwas a C player who wouldn't let me fix it when it was discovered.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend you go work at Amazon.[3]

Sorry if I've gotten off topic. It's rare that you can find candid descriptions of what it's like to worksomewhere.... since Steve felt free to be candid, I figured I'd share my experiences. I also worked forother large companies, like, for instance, Microsoft. Microsoft was weird in a sort of cult like way, andhad its own management problems, but was much more enjoyable... and really treated theiremployees a whole lot better. At MSFT, hardship was having to share your office with anotherprogrammer. At Amazon, I was literally in a hallway, with a dozen other people, with major foottraffic walking past my desk (And right behind my chair) all day long, a lot of noise and a very largewindow over my shoulder reflecting right into my monitor... all day long.

Worst Job Ever.

Thank you for indulging my venting.

[1] It wasn't just me either, by the time I left, %60 of the team had already gotten internaltransfers or resigned. I was being loyal, and went to HR to try and get some advice or mediation, butdespite being promised confidentiality, the notes of my meeting with the HR rep were forwarded tomy boss.

[2] At amazon they have this crazy idea that engineers should have pagers. I'm sure it soundedgreat at the time. I didn't have the pager that week, but that didn't matter to the boss[4], whoknew I'd been the one to find the issue. So he called me. I think the phone rang for a good 20minutes before I woke up.

Never let your employer give you a pager, unless you're an ops guy.

[3] After I left, and after my team was literally decimated by the hostile environment created by ourboss, I found out he got promoted! Yep, now he's managing managers.

[4] Why was the boss up at 3am? Well, Bezos called him, but he'd been up already... he was a hardpartier who, just between you and me, also was selling drugs on the side. Most of the stoners inPacMed were getting their bags from him.

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jrockway 23 hours ago | link

I interviewed at Amazon and got an offer recently, but I have to admit, it did kind of soundlike this kind of job. I really liked the offer stage, where I asked for 4 weeks vacation (what Ihave now) instead of their standard 2 weeks. "That's not negotiable! It wouldn't be fair if yougot better benefits just because you're better at negotiating than others on your team!"

True. Offer rejected.

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nirvana 23 hours ago | link

You know, I think when I was hired, I went from 3 weeks of vacation to 2 weeks... andI didn't even think about it, because I was too busy dealing with the fact that theydidn't want to pay me anywhere close to what I was making before. Which was, by theway, a below market salary paid by a startup, to begin with! I finally got them to meetit with a "hiring bonus" that would match my previous salary for the first years I wasthere... I left before that ran out.

Other mistake I made-- I'd been working for startups for so long, that I really, reallywanted a nice, stable job, where I would be able to put in 40-60 hours a week, andleave my work at home. That's something they pitched me on, too. So, Icompromised... I figured, less stress, a little less compensation.

Turns out, it was much more stress. Even if your hours are lower, really badmanagement can make your life terrible. (and it wasn't just my boss, it was prettymuch the whole of engineering management, near as I could tell.)

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bilalaijazi 13 hours ago | link

According to "Showstopper!", Microsoft would allow developers to go MIA for a



bit after completing a tough project. That seems like a fair policy if you have amature set of developers who deliver on their commitments.

replypotatolicious 13 hours ago | link

There are significant parts of Amazon where this does happen - but itreally varies from department to department, and manager to manager.

The depressing thing is, when you do get some time off after pulling longhours for a tough project, it's all done under the table. Amazon isextremely cheap when it comes to off-time, so managers essentially haveto put their ass on the line to let their reports get well-deserveddowntime.

Kudos to the bosses that do it, but one of the reasons that eventuallyconvinced me to leave was that... things like this shouldn't have to bedone with a nudge and a wink.

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InclinedPlane 12 hours ago | link

At MS it's pretty typical for the pace of work to become very, very casualafter a release (which typically happens every few years).

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ajtaylor 22 hours ago | link

Europe and Australia have forever ruined me with their standard 4 weeks of vacationtime. I can't fathom ever going back to anything less.

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For me, it's hard to make even 4 weeks work when I have to countprogramming conferences as vacation. My ideal job would offer me twice thatvacation (or pay for 4 conferences a year, their choice). So far, it seems nobodywill do this in the US.

(And you wonder why people are always posting to HN about how they can'thire anyone. The problem is not that people don't want to work for you. Theproblem is that you can't afford them.)

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I've never had to use vacation time for conferences, but then again I onlygo to one conference a year. Here's hoping my Aussie employer bucksthat trend!

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Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You haveto wonder how we ever get anything done here...

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toyg 21 hours ago | link

Productivity and long hours are inversely proportional, in my book.

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mhd 20 hours ago | link

I've looked at the European statistics a while ago, and the averageworking hours are pretty much the same wherever you go, regardless ofwhat's the maximum per week, how many vacation days you get andhow many holidays the country has…



And I think the general first-world deviation isn't that big either, apartfrom the Koreans (and to a minor degree, Americans).

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ams6110 19 hours ago | link

Six weeks is not uncommon in the USA if you are in higher ed.

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bmj 21 hours ago | link

Out of curiosity, is there much of a start-up culture there? If so, dofounders (and first employees) adhere to the same guidelines? At leasthere in the U.S., founding/working at a start-up basically assumes long-ish hours.

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Bootvis 51 minutes ago | link

I think the the start up culture is less prevalent here in theNetherlands than in SV but it certainly exists.

From my personal experience I can say these guidelines are notstrictly adhered. The young, university educated people I hang outwith all work more then 40 hours and take about 20 vacation daysand work 40-60 hours, more if necessary.

However I think direct comparison is pretty hard. What does counttowards the total amount worked? For example including socialdrinks in their total biasing the amount upwards.

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jacobr 19 hours ago | link

Sweden has 5 weeks of vacation and a 40 hour standard workweek, and pretty successful companies such as Spotify, Skype,Voddler, SoundCloud, Flattr, etc, were founded here. I doubt mostof those founders only worked 40 hour work weeks though, as anentrepreneur you decide your own hours, and overtime for regularemployees is not uncommon.

It probably varies a lot depending on company culture. A friendworking at a startup recently got hi-5's from the bosses when hesaid he had worked 11 hours a day the entire previous week, notalk about taking compensation leave to rest or anything like that.At my company (not a startup) an 11 hour day would be prettyextreme, and if my boss was aware he would probably insist Icome in late the following day.

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No, our country is notoriously lacking in entrepreneurship, make ofthat what you will.

We do still manage to have a pretty good economic output andsome business success stories though, so there might besomething to be said for working fewer hours.

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bmj 20 hours ago | link

Yeah, I wasn't calling all Danes lazy--just curious if anotoriously overworked sub-culture might exist there.

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mark-r 17 hours ago | link

Old joke: "Being a founder means you can work half-days if you



want. The best part is you get to choose which 12 hours that is."

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felipemnoa 9 hours ago | link

Awesome!

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dasp 11 hours ago | link

When we talk about vacation weeks, we mean sets of 5 working days,not 7. Right?

So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.

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Having the time to take off, and also the cultural push to take it all,makes a huge difference in productivity from my perspective.

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jdietrich 15 hours ago | link

The legal minimum in the UK is now 5.6 weeks; That's still amongst the lowestin Europe. I simply cannot comprehend how even the best paid workers inAmerica expect less holiday than the lowest-paid European labourers.

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The reason is because the market doesn't demand vacation time. We getpaid more and have less taxes, though.

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toyg 18 hours ago | link

At Oracle UK I used to get up to 42 days, of which 10 could roll over to thefollowing year. We were periodically overworked and under-compensatedanyway (which is why I left). Our US colleagues hated were really envious.

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wgx 22 hours ago | link

True. The 'standard' in France is 5 weeks.

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michaelochurch 9 hours ago | link

This is when most people realize that the U.S. is a third-world country.

If not that, it's when they go to the doctor in France and ask about billing andget a funny stare.

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jeremyjarvis 20 hours ago | link

Noooo. They seriously only give 2 weeks holiday a year? that's insane.

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jsolson 7 hours ago | link

Two in year one, three in year two.

Plus an additional 6 "personal days".

That being said, I've yet to actually take a vacation day at Amazon, despiteregularly getting automated e-mails about it from HR. I send a polite OOTO e-mail to my team and that seems to be sufficient. This may very from team toteam and manager to manager.



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bitops 13 hours ago | link

That's very normal in the US.

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mhd 12 hours ago | link

If I recall correctly, the US is the only developed country withoutmandatory minium paid employment leave (federal employees excepted).Which small-government fans might accept readily, but it also hasamongst the lowest actual average vacation times… Apparently freecitizens want to work. (One statistic had the Canadian average lower,though)

Strangely enough, this doesn't seem to have a straight-forwardcorrelation with yearly hours worked. Italians have about the samenumber as Americans, but 20 mandatory days and quite a lot of Catholicholidays. Koreans and the Greek seam to top that list, although I'mcurrently not a big believer in Greek statistics…

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ArbitraryLimits 11 hours ago | link

Italian office hours are something like 8-12 and 2-8 or so. The(official) workday is much longer there,with a nice break in themiddle.

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srdev 10 hours ago | link

2 weeks vacation plus 6 days personal days when you start. After a year, theybump it up to 3 weeks. They raise it to 4 weeks after 6 years of employment.Not too terrible, really, but not great either.

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j_col 22 hours ago | link

I interviewed for a support role at AWS last year, and that was bad enough. 1.5 hrs of atechnical screening call, followed by 6 hrs straight (like, no breaks whatsoever) of face-to-faceinterviews with 6 separate people, only to be told that I needed to improve my networkingskills, and that I should take some networking certifications and apply again next year. Thebeautiful thing? I never claimed to be a networking guy in any shape or form, and it wasn'tpart of the job description for the role I applied for in the first place. Sounds like I dodged abullet...

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"We set a high bar! B players hire C players! Only hire A players!"

The way it works at amazon is, if anyone doesn't like you, you're out. It doesn't matterif its relevant or not. It doesn't matter if the person who doesn't like you knowsnothing about programming. My boss- the one with the criminal justice degree- wouldoften veto people because they "weren't good programmers". Of course, he had noclue who was a good programmer and who wasn't because he couldn't program!

Sometimes, a person will be angling for the position you're interviewing for. Only, thatperson will also be included in in the interview loop. They have an incentive to say no,because they want the job.

Inside Amazon, this is called "keeping a high hiring bar". So, they go thru greatexpense and hassle to bring people in, and then pat themselves on the back when theyarbitrarily rule someone out. Saying no, means they're doing their job, keeping thatbar high! They once said no to a guy I'd worked with previously, who, as far as I'mconcerned, was a much better programmer than me. (Better looking, gets along with



people better, etc as well.) I mentioned this to the hiring manager, and he said "Wehave to keep a high bar!"

How many people do you think want to interview with Amazon again after going thru a6 hour process like that?

Since their process is completely arbitrary, sometimes they get really great people (godonly knows why they stick around-- I think a lot of engineers don't really know theirown worth) but they also get a lot of people who randomly rub the right people theright way and get hired. It was completely arbitrary, it seemed to me.

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SandB0x 21 hours ago | link

> Since their process is completely arbitrary, sometimes they get really greatpeople (god only knows why they stick around-- I think a lot of engineers don'treally know their own worth) but they also get a lot of people who randomly rubthe right people the right way and get hired. It was completely arbitrary, itseemed to me.

This seems to be true for the vast majority of businesses.

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kamaal 20 hours ago | link

Very true,

Boot polishing manager's shoes works wonders in many companies. In alot of places especially large corporates, Managers build their own gang.Loyalties run in the hierarchy throughout their stay in the company.

Now you might be the greatest guy on the team, but if you don't acceptthe manager as the king you are screwed. Your effort goes down in thedrain. You work real hard to prove yourself and you get branded as a badteam player. Yes you are expected, to give away your work to themanagers favorite 'kids' in the team.

I see this thing originates very early, even during the interviews itself.Such managers have knack to identify such people. And they generallyget hired.

Needlessly to say such managers once in the company won't rest untilthey have ruined everything they will ever touch. And people whom theyhire replicate the same. This continues until the whole company is left torot.

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peterb 21 hours ago | link

The funny thing about "A players hire A players and B players hire C players" isthat every company I have worked at that uses that mantra is full of B & Cplayers from the top down.

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phillmv 19 hours ago | link

What I don't get about that rule is what prevents A players from hiring Band C players, and what prevents B players from hiring A players.

I'm more than capable of recognizing someone who is smarter than I am,and as a rule of thumb I prefer to work with people who are smarter thanI am.

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sethg 17 hours ago | link

I believe the theory is that the A players, secure in their own skills,want to be able to delegate work to people who are as competentas they are, whereas the B players want to surround themselves



with people who make them look good by comparison.

replyzippy 15 hours ago | link

A prospective hire who is an A (in whatever field) wants towork with their kind, and so is less likely to sign up at acompany full of B-level people.

Also, as mentioned above, it is harder for many B-levelpeople to recognize and value an A level person in the hiringprocess. An A may come across as arrogant by describingthings as good or bad to a B when they're simplyknowledgeable and confident because of that.

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And by that mechanism, C players use the "only hireA players" rule to claim that A players are "not goodenough", though such objections don't get raisedabout other C players.

There were some A programmers at Amazon, andthey were respected, but they weren't the ones whomade the hiring decisions. Since any B or C can vetoany hire, A people often didn't get hired in favor of Bor C people. (and A people who already worked there,eventually, got excluded from hiring loops becausethey're "needed elsewhere.")

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tuhin 18 hours ago | link

what prevents A players from hiring B and C players They know itwill not end up good for anybody. Also they understand hiringanother A player or if possible an A++ player is good for overallhealth of the company.

prevents B players from hiring A players Ego and in a bigcorporation, the fear of the hire going ahead of you.

Also another deadly combination is the B player who hires anotherA player thinking they themselves are A+ player and spoils the funfor everybody.

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munin 19 hours ago | link

proponents of the mantra would say that this means you're an "A"player.

there is some research that shows that your own competencedirectly affects how good a judge you are of your/others relativecompetence, i.e. people who are low competence will ratethemselves routinely as 9-10 / 10 but people who are highcompetence will rate themselves 5-6 / 10 ...

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sirclueless 12 hours ago | link

If A players surround themselves with A players and Bplayers surround themselves with C players then thosenumbers sound about right.

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Yeah, the "bar raiser" is a concept that you will hear about when you interview



there. Mine was the last guy after a very long day (sixth interviewer), whoactually introduced himself to me as "the local bar raiser", and then got me upwriting algorithms on a whiteboard for an hour. Like I said earlier, I can do thatstuff but I'm no network guy.

> How many people do you think want to interview with Amazon again aftergoing thru a 6 hour process like that?

Not me that’s for sure, and I thought it was very arrogant of them at the timeto suggest that I go off and getting some network training on my own time andexpense and apply again next year. Like I’ve nothing better to do.

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There's a massive amount of arrogance to this type of hiring. I think,however, that it reflects the companies opinion of itself and itsemployees.

Someone with significant skills is going to have significant self esteem.Are they going to want to put up with being treated that way?

In my day, the "bar raiser" didn't announce it, and so you never knew, ifyou even knew they did that. Announcing it seems profoundly stupid.And arrogant.

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typicalrunt 18 hours ago | link

I can't believe Amazon still conducts their interviews in 6 hour blocks. Iinterviewed there in December 2000 (yup, 2 weeks before the bust) and I wasflown in to interview with a crap-ton of other people.

We interviewed for 4 hours, then broke for a 45 minute lunch (where we werebasically interviewed/watched by employees), then interviewed for another 3hours. Then several of us were taken out for dinner by employees where, duh,we were quasi-interviewed for our social skills. That kind of day is crazy and Inever want to do it again.

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gcp 21 hours ago | link

Note that much of what was said in this post and the parent applies to Google,too.

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Yes I agree, probably the only difference is that they would make youcome in on six different days for your six interviews, and maybe spreadthem over a few months, and then still tell you no over somethingapparently random. I refuse to interview there despite being approachedby them twice, I've heard enough stories from my friends to put me off.

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joelhaasnoot 21 hours ago | link

Sounds like the "screening day" I went through at a large multinational here inthe Netherlands. 5 25 minute interviews, lots of talking, presentations, got anoffer, just so they could decide "Oh yeah, we have people with nothing to do,sorry, can't hire you"

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hiddenl 20 hours ago | link

I concur, I interviewed with them back in April this year 1hr tech call then 8 hours nonstop interviews 9am-5pm (each with at least 2, sometimes 4+ people) Even lunchbreak was an interview! I didn't get an offer it in the end, their reason - not enough



Java/J2EE - And not once on my cv/resume had I mentioned I had experience inthat?!

And yes, one guy came in and introduced himself as the 'bar-raiser' sat back in hischair and expected me to be somewhat impressed by this.

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simplekoala 10 hours ago | link

As an ex-Amazonian, I have to second your opinion. It was by far the worst employmentexperience I had at a tech company. In my 10 year tenure, I fortunately didn't come acrossany company as bad as Amazon, when it comes to how it treats its employees. Themanagement doesn't have any value for the lives of their developers, and use them astissues. Use and throw seems to their policy. If you can take their abuse, and don't valueyour personal life, you can survive there long enough. You are expected to work like slaves,always on call. Office cubes were cramped, there is no free soda, drinks. Even coffee theystocked in the kitchen was cheap. They celebrate frugality at the cost of quality of workingconditions they provide to their developers. No wonder, one of the SVP's life misson when hejoined Amazon from Microsoft was to make Amazon a place where developers would love tostay. Average turn-over at Amazon is around 18-24 months. Most of the line managers wereclueless and sometimes completely non-technical. I wondered why smart engineers wouldeven consider working there, when they can work in awesome companies in the valley wherethey celebrate/cherish people they hire, and actually care about them. Most of the kids whoare hired right out of school, wisen up, and leave in 2 years. I worked at Microsoft too.Microsoft with all it faults still takes amazing care of its employees. Great perks. Amazon justpays salary, and its medical insurance is a joke when compared to Microsoft. One otherbiggest gripe I have about Amazon is that it leverages so many open-source technologies butthey don't give back (much) to tech community or industry as such. It is not in their DNA.Their attitude is similar when it comes to its people. My advice for anyone consideringAmazon, should seriously talk to current and Ex-Amazonians, and get a real-picture of whatyou can get out of Amazon. Folks who don't have the faintest idea about working for Amazonseemed to have downvoted a similar opinion of mine in the past on HN. For clueless folks whothink, I am some dis-gruntled employee, I can gladly quote/refer to Yegge's post now.Quitting Amazon was one of the wisest decisions I made.

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rdouble 10 hours ago | link

I wondered why smart engineers would even consider working there

Amazon seemed to pay pretty good starting salaries. I remember in 2008 losing anintern because we couldn't match the salary.

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haldean 7 hours ago | link

Advice taken. I have an offer from them right now, as well as an offer from elsewhere -- after seeing this whole thread, I think I'll go for the elsewhere. Thanks for the advice!

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Amazon is still a great place to learn, if you are willing to take the brunt ofoperations and don't mind having no life. Dismal working conditions, over-working, heavy operations load (group specific), having no-life, working overholidays, poor line managers, cover-your-ass politics aside - It is one of the fewplaces where you truly get to see how large scale web-based/distributed systemsare conceived, built, and operated. It could be a great career launch pad, if youare just out of school. It will be like drinking from a fire-hose. If you are single,and in a good group with the right set of peers then it could work out well foryou. If elsewhere is a super hot startup (Quora/Palantir/Dropbox and ilk or goodtech companies like Google, FB, Twitter, Linkedin or even Zynga (pre-IPO makesit hot in my opinion) then I would seriously consider the down-sides of workingfor Amazon, and living in Seattle.

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Good luck, and hopefully the other company is more of a startup.

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felipemnoa 9 hours ago | link

tl;dr Friends don't let friends work at Amazon

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njharman 19 hours ago | link

> The problem I'd wanted to fix 2-3 months earlier. The problem I'd gotten chewed out fortrying to surface but been told "won't fix" all the way up and down the chain of command.

I mostly don't have responsibilities (family) and 6mo living expenses and supreme self-confidence (aka the perhaps non-rational belief that'll I'll find work or at least make a living nomatter what). Because when people try to pull shit like that. I email Bezos and all the peoplewho said won't fix, (paraphrased) "Fuck you, you ignored me months ago when I brought thisup. Now I'm ignoring you when you ask me to drop everything and fix this right now! Youshould fire these incompetent fucks but you will probably fire me. That's fine, this companydoesn't deserve me. Happy Holidays"

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kabdib 18 hours ago | link

HR is not there for you. HR is there for the company.

Never forget that.

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funkah 18 hours ago | link

The HR people in my company help me all the time. It's a shame that so manyworkplaces are so adversarial.

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mturmon 16 hours ago | link

It depends on what you want, maybe they help you in some cases because itcosts nothing, or doing so does not touch a "live wire" of corporate policy orgovernment regulation.

But for other matters, HR does pursue their own agenda, not yours. It'simportant to remember.

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jc4p 8 hours ago | link

When I worked in retail my name and zip code was incorrect in the companyrecords. When I asked who I should contact to fix this, my store manager toldme I'd need to contact HR but to never ever do that. I'll always wonder whatwould've happened if I had contacted them.

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revorad 23 hours ago | link

I'm really shocked to read that (and the OP's rant about Amazon). Of course, I've never had acorporate job.

It amazes me that Amazon managed to be so successful, despite treating their employees sobadly.

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I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything badabout Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made mypost because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went



into more detail.)

Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS poweredAmazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortunately, others thereat the time have posted in the thread as well. But come back to HN in a couple weekswhen AWS has done their next press release, and say that, and you'll likely be downvoted to oblivion.

The thing is, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos are damn good at spin. You see glowing articlesthat talk about Jeff as if he were a visionary, boldly leading his commerce site into thefuture of web services. (As I understand it, AWS was pirate operation, which got coverfrom a politically endowed VP in the company, and they were able to get it far enoughalong that Jeff saw the value of it, when he'd previously wanted to knife that baby.)Their manipulative ways extend to other people as well.. and when you're getting mostof your stuff from them, and you've had good customer services, you naturally inclinedto want to believe in them.

People believe Amazon must be good in all ways, because they are good in one way.

Amazon is really, FREAKING, good at fulfillment. Amazon prime, their return policies,their streamlined ordering policies... at this point, ordering things from other websiteshas so much more friction that they just feel old. "You mean I have to enter my creditcard? Why don't you just sell this thing on Amazon.com and let them do it right!"

I don't know how Amazon treats their stockholders. They treat their employees terribly(but they do tend to hire a mix of type-A aggressive and meek. The meek just aregrateful to keep their jobs and the Type-As love the political sport). But they treat theircustomers damn good.

And they have the fulfillment thing nailed cold. I give them respect for that.

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> "You must be disgruntled"

But you are disgruntled. You've got excellent reasons for being so. I alwayswonder why people will use things like that as stoppers for the discussion, thefact that someone is disgruntled alone should not be cause for dismissal, theunderlying reasons are what matter. And you've gone over and beyond the callof duty in my opinion here and I am frankly surprised that Amazon manages tooperate if they treat their employees like this.

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mbyrne 20 hours ago | link

"Disgruntled" is a straight up ad hominem attack that doesn't addresswhether or not what the person says is true or not.

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"grouchy, testy, sullen, grumpy, dissatisfied."

All of the above, and I really don't see the ad hominem in there.It's just a description of a state of mind with respect to anotherentity.

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wanorris 16 hours ago | link

But the real world usage of disgruntled is as a marker for"This person is biased against the company, so any fair-minded person should discount what they have to say."

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mcantor 5 hours ago | link

Ad hominem doesn't mean "calling them a name or label



that isn't true"--it means "implying that their argument isless valid because of their state of mind or perspective".

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herdrick 17 hours ago | link

AWS was pirate operation

That's amazing to me. I thought such things were never done in softwareanymore because: why not leave the company and do the same thing in yourown startup? Same hard work, high risk, etc, but with giant upside. Was itbecause of something wrong with Seattle's startup culture?

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potatolicious 13 hours ago | link

There are a lot of really great products that simply cannot be built by ascrappy startup, and require the ginormous scale of a place like Amazonto pull off.

Not only for deep funding pockets, but also for existing relationships. Sayyou had an idea that would dramatically improve online retail - you caneither develop a white-box solution and try to shop it around (and havethem clone it out from under you), or you can build your own online retailempire (good luck), or you can join one.

It's part of what got me to stick around AMZN as long as I did. Myself andsome colleagues were very much of the internal-entrepreneurial mindset.We developed lots of prototypes, some of which received rave recognitionthroughout the company. I left after I realized my management chain(can't speak for others) had little to no real interest in turning them intoproducts. They were more than happy to give lip service, trophies, andhave me put together presentations on how innovative and scrappy wewere, though.

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A startup doesn't have Amazon's network of datacenters or hardwareresources.

(I've never worked at Amazon, but I'd also heard that AWS was a smallskunkworks project that basically got cover from Amazon's CTO, WernerVogels, who protected and nurtured it until it was too big to kill.)

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aidenn0 9 hours ago | link

You are a commenter on HN, so you have a distorted view about howwilling the average person is to start a company.

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ryanpers 15 hours ago | link

There is no effective Seattle startup culture. I worked in the Seattle areafor 7 years, and startups are not really a big thing. Going to work atmicrosoft is a big thing. You make more money there anyways.

A lot of this is due to the lack of a VC infrastructure I think. no sand hillroad there.

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o1iver 21 hours ago | link

I think you are very right about the customer support thing. That is the onereason why I spend hundreds of dollars a year at Amazon. From the customerperspective (the only I have) you feel like a god. They nailed that one on thehead.



Example: My girlfriend sat on my Kindle and broke it. I called and said that itwas broken. Without any questions they just offered to send me a new one forfree! After something like that I will always go back to Amazon (and tell myfriends about it)...

replytemphn 19 hours ago | link

It's probably really hard to run a company with tens of thousands of employeesand achieve market success while also having everyone inside like and respectyou. From a systems standpoint, it's hard to argue with Amazon's recentsuccesses (AWS, Kindle Fire). If they aren't an A company in tech then no oneis.

This is not to dispute your observations in any way, shape, or form. Just that it'sa huge T-Rex from the outside in terms of objective metrics like productsshipped, even if it does have dysfunctional internal organs.

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danmaz74 16 hours ago | link

How is the kindle fire a success? It just launched...

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suivix 8 hours ago | link

Perhaps the number of pre-orders was a success, along with theirclaimed features at a low price point?

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danmaz74 1 hour ago | link

My point is: Only time will tell. For now, you can call it a PRsuccess, but this is not what we were talking about, I guess;)

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I have been a victim of this down-voting in the past :) Even till end of 2007,majority of Amazon.com was not powered by AWS. If I remember correctly,website team tested out serving traffic on EC2 machines during 06-07timeframe, and categorically declared that Amazon can't run on cloud withoutcrossing major technology hurdles.

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bambax 23 hours ago | link

Yes, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? If those horror stories are true (and we have noreason to doubt they are), it kinda shows that the way you treat your employeesdoesn't really matter to your success.

It certainly matters a lot to them; it matters from a moral point of view; but from apractical point of view the only individuals whose happiness matters are the customers.

Of course, if your employees are so unhappy that they make your customers' lifemiserable, you have a problem. But Amazon is still very far from that.

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On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm themsubstantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite ashard as they will, eventually).

Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'mpretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess areally truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that.



The stream of people leaving the company isn't a trickle as it is a well-managedplaces. It isn't even a modest stream. It's an outright deluge, particularly in thismarket where everyone else is desperate and willing to pay (protip: Amazon, asa rule, is not).

This is starting to show itself in many places in the company. In a lot of placesthere are no longer any senior engineers left who know how the system works.In their place are fresh-faced college grads struggling to contend with a systemthey neither have the experience nor the documentation to maintain, much lessextend. The average tenure of the Amazon engineer is embarrassingly short,and coupled with the company's notorious lack of documentation, it means thattechnical debt is accumulating at an alarming rate.

There are constantly projects to completely revamp/redesign some portion ofAmazon's systems. In my observation this is less about an honest improvementover the old system (sometimes there IS no improvement) but rather becausenobody knows how the fuck the old thing works. The truly sad thing is, theyhave trouble keeping engineers around long enough to even see that redesignthrough.

If you know where to look on Amazon's site, you would see lots of evidence ofthis already. Extremely deep integration into systems that literally no one stillwith the company understands. Tons of mission critical code whose originalauthor is long gone, no documentation exists, and in fact the code isn't ownedby any team. I've seen many hacks to work around these problems, though Idoubt they'd be super apparent to the common Amazon shopper.

The problem here, like many other companies in a similar stage, is that verylittle of Amazon's management has a technical background at this point. Bezoscertainly does, and I still think he's one of the best CEOs in the industry rightnow, but many of his underlings... not so much. A lot of management do notsee this accumulation of technical debt. Difficulties working with said debt isperceived as either "natural" difficulties of working with technology, or worse,incompetence. Amazon's internal existence is a depressing cycle of: hire people,people spend eons learning how the previous guys did it, people write code,people get fed up and leave, hire more people, people spend eons learning howthe previous guys did it...

If any Amazonian management is reading, I have one thing I really want todrive home: stop being so fucking "frugal" with equipment. It is a travesty thatmy development desktop was a Celeron worth $300 on eBay. Not because I likehaving the newest shiny, because I couldn't even run multiple devenvironments on it, like I had to for my JOB, and building my code took 12 fullminutes, instead of, say, 3. Stop shitting on your devs with dinky 5 year-oldmonitors and give them some screen real estate. There are plenty of studiesthat outright prove the productivity boost that comes with bigger monitors.

reply nirvana 22 hours ago | link

I still periodically try out some of the regression tests that I'd done backwhen I worked there... there are bugs that have been in the site forabout 4 years now. I think when my team was reduced by %90 frompeople leaving, they just disbanded it and nobodies doing that work now.Certainly the major initiatives haven't moved forward.

I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he was ahedge fund guy before moving out to Seattle. But I agree with everythingelse you said.

The funny thing was, when I got hired I was told that they were going tolet people use Macs and that it would be a few months. I had my ownlaptop I was willing to bring in and use, and though they were trailingmacs with a few people, I was told I'd be fired if I used my personal macfor work.

So, I had to use a piece of crap HP laptop. The thing was always in theshop. There were many days when I basically lost an entire days worth of



work because it would break. They replaced it several times. (and I wasbabying it.. .it lived on my desk for the most part.)

So, not only could they have had zero costs by letting me use my ownmachine, but they lost more than the cost of the laptop several timesover in lost productivity by me not being able to work when the machinethey made me use was in the shop.

And when I left, they still hadn't approved macs (or maybe the ITdepartment decided they were "too insecure" or some BS.)

While I was there, they were constantly starting initiatives and thenabandoning them. Like the restaurant menus. The movie schedules. Thescanning of mail order catalogs!? They'd start some project, do a pressrelease, then disband the team and never advance the code again... itwould just sit there and rot.

I think one of the reasons that most of management there is nottechnical is that non-technical people are threatened by technical peoplein that role. Technical people have quite an edge when managingprogrammers. I think engineers who express an interest in moving to amanagement role are often perceived as a threat.

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aphexairlines 20 hours ago | link

Regarding laptops, the situation has improved a lot from what youdescribe. Instead of crappy HP laptops, we now have thinkpads likeevery other tech company. And if you want a mac laptop, they'llgive you a new one.

Of course there's room for improvement (SSDs, linux desktop,bring your own OS) but IT is aware of the pain points and makingthe appropriate cases for expenses and head count.

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mun2mun 12 hours ago | link

I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he wasa hedge fund guy before moving out to Seattle.

So what can you say about this post posted here 3 years ago.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882. The blog post wasdown, archive.org didn't help also :). But as far as I remember theblogger was praising about bezos leadership skill. Also commentson HN supported that. I am reading HN for about 3 years. In firsttwo years I never saw this kind of amazon bashing.In fact therewas many post praising about amazon's internal culture. How onearth things change so dramatically in last one year. Is there somekind of PR war happening here? Honest question.

Edit: found archive.org snapshothttp://web.archive.org/web/20090211060734/http://blog.layer8....

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There is a PR war, and it's been waged by Amazon since themid 1990s when they went public. They had terriblenumbers, and so they reframed themselves as a "techstartup" to get in the dot com boom.... and it worked.

There has been, and continues to be, massive propagandaefforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and toposition Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. Infact, I saw an article the other day comparing the two.



It's nonsense. Bezos, in any other context, would not be abad person. He's got good management skills, and he has adesire for keeping the quality bar high. But the problem is,he doesn't give a damn about other people.

He's got a very utilitarian viewpoint of other people. Everyinteraction with them, from his perspective, seems to beabout how he can best profit from them. He sees people asresources to be exploited.

I'm a pure capitalist, I don't have a problem with trade, buthe's more like a predator.

At least, this is what my interactions with him, and theculture he created at Amazon tell me.

You can sustain such an illusion only for so long, however.In seattle, as far back as at least 1998, everyone know thatAmazon was a terrible place to work and an even worseplace to do business with (as a supplier, etc.)

I knew that, but I didn't want to believe it, when I took thejob.

I do accept responsibility for the stupidity that I displayed indoing that, and in sticking around after I should have left asothers have pointed out. I could have avoided this, andshould have, by simply holding myself in higher esteem...and never taken that job.

replyleoc 3 hours ago | link

> There has been, and continues to be, massivepropaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitchthem to people, and to position Bezos as a visionaryin the style of Steve Jobs.

I couldn't help noticing that if you go theAmazon.com page for Isaacson's Steve Jobs biohttp://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485... , you seehttp://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/159... on the first page of"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought"results; I couldn't help wondering if that placement issolely determined by a computer assessment of whatcustomers also bought. But who knows, maybe it is.

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I can't speak authoritatively since I didn't workon that component, but Amazon takes theintegrity of these things very seriously. I wouldbe extremely surprised if any of these widgetsare "tainted", as it were.

For all the crap I've thrown at Amazon in thisthread, if there's one thing they are clean ofit's working against their customers. It is, by avery long shot, the most customer centric bigcompany I've ever seen.

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I had the fortunate opportunity to present to Bezos once.That guy is sharp as a tack - asked some very tough, but



fair questions, all of which suggested he got what we werepresenting and grokked at least the bulk of the technologyunderlying it. It was not at all a "uh huh that's nice go do it"scenario at all, and I was pleasantly surprised.

He may not write code, but I think it would be a mistake toclaim he isn't a technologist.

If the rest of the company's management had half themanagerial competence of Jeff Bezos, I'd run back to thatcompany with arms wide open.

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PR war? Check out Amazon Glassdoor reviews for engineers!This sentiment has been consistent. I am a little surprisedthat people were praising Amazon's culture here. This alsoexplains I was down-voted in the past. One thing I reallylearnt well at Amazon was how not to treat your developers,and what mistakes you shouldn't make to build great, andlong-lasting teams.

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Do you guys remember the contraptions they stuck on the laptop'sfor secure logins/VPN? Made me the butt of all jokes, carrying thatthing around..Sigh

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praptak 19 hours ago | link

"On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harmthem substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public(or quite as hard as they will, eventually)."

If it hasn't hit them yet, it might after the rant.

Given the Dilbert Employer From Hell publicity generated by the rant andthe subsequent discussion, I'd say that they might have trouble filling infor the people that leave. Heck, even some of their current employeesmight read the rant and realize how crappy their current situation is.

Off on a tangent:

"I couldn't even run multiple dev environments on it, like I had to for myJOB, and building my code took 12 full minutes, instead of, say, 3."

Local dev environments? My current workstation has a mere 2GBmemory and an Athlon X2 which was all the rage in 2005 :) The buildsfly, because they are delegated to a compile farm. The added benefit isthat I don't have to muck with the build tools settings.

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ryanpers 15 hours ago | link

Locally in Seattle, Amazon has a really bad rep. Only on places likehackernews where everyone is excited about AWS (despite itsmany, huge, annoying flaws, remember when ebs when down -AGAIN?) do people not realize this.

Amazon has lost a lot of key tech talent, it's been happening sinceabout 2006 when the economy picked up a lot more.

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Seems like only people in Seattle, and Ex-Amazonians have



a clue about working for Amazon. Don't be surprised if HNtrolls down-vote your comments out of sheer ignorace.

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I think a large part of it is that traditionally companiesthat are back working environments also producecrap for products.

But yet Amazon, product-wise, is fast-moving,innovative, and often right on the money when itcomes to what customers want. It's a lot like Apple inthat regard.

So it becomes difficult to grok how this seeminglyinnovative company that has its finger on the pulseof retail (and beyond) can become such a doggishplace to work.

It's the ultimate siren call isn't it. It took me twoyears before I decided throwing myself at that brickwall every day wasn't worth it, cool products orotherwise.

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davedx 22 hours ago | link

Haha it's so sad when companies can't even buy decent equipment for anemployee they're spending 30-50x that much on per year. I'm currentlyspending half my time at this job developing enterprise Java in aVirtualBox instance on an old Windows XP machine with 2GB of RAM. I'mjust hoping they pay for the JRebel license before my demo licenseexpires.

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cphang 15 hours ago | link

You can try to use https://social.jrebel.com

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paddy_m 17 hours ago | link

I did some interviews with amazon, when they told me that their devsget a 22 inch monitor, I almost dropped the phone. They said that theywanted to keep a "lean startup environment", bullshit. That alonestopped me from going further along in the interview process with them.

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When I was there, new hires got 24" monitors. Not too bad - buthilariously enough the old hands had to live with 17-19" old Dells(though they got two of them, as if that really helps that much).

I just don't get it. Monitors are items that survives multiple techgenerations, have huge demonstrable benefits (moreso thanspeedy laptops or pretty offices), and don't even cost much at all!(certainly less than SSDs or high-end MacBook Pros!)

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dpritchett 13 hours ago | link

Forgive me for being dense, but is 22" insufficient or were you justsuggesting that you didn't believe Amazon? Here in Memphis I'veseen devs work on setups ranging from 13" to 24" depending onthe team.



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paddy_m 13 hours ago | link

I have had a 30 inch at home for the past 3 years, I'mlooking to upgrade to twin 30s. At work I have a 30 inch,it's all so inexpensive, that its not really worth discussing.

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lallysingh 11 hours ago | link

Considering that I've seen that in a prior bad job myself, and thecorrelation between that and "bad work environment," I'd say that shittycomputers for a developer is a classic red flag.

In my book, it means that bean counting has taken over productivity.That's no place to be a software developer.

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Amazon internal propagand emphasizes that Amazon is a startup. "It's dayone!" is a phrase I heard way too many times. They have "door desks" -- whichactually cost them more than regular off the shelf furniture would-- but theypretend like they're being frugal to perpetuate the perception that they're astartup. (When I found out about the door desks costs, I was sworn to secrecy,it is very important for morale.)

I think the result of this is that a lot of employees believe it.

I think people generally, want something to believe in.

If you give them something to believe in, and it seems plausible, and especially ifits tied to their income, they'll believe it.

And they'll work harder for it.

It worked on me-- that's why I didn't just go back to sleep that night. That'swhy I stayed on for several months after that, until things became untenablefor me. Hell, I was going to stay with the company, I had met the AWS team,had gotten an offer for a position there and was in the process of transferring,and only quit when that transfer was blocked!

In a way, "well run" could mean that you get a lot of work out of youremployees, even if they are miserable. I think optimizing for employeehappiness can help you, but it isn't necessarily the only way to have highproductivity.

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rachelbythebay 22 hours ago | link

I have an acid test for any place which claims to be a startup. Whensomeone proclaims this, ask them to answer any two of the followingquestions:

- What's my name? (Covering your badge, naturally)

- What am I working on?

- Where am I from?

If the bigwigs can't answer that, I'm sorry, you've moved past actualstartup-dom and you're just in la-la land where you just think you areone.

Unfortunately, I only thought of this acid test after leaving a place with30K employees which had started proclaiming it semi-regularly duringtheir Friday get-togethers.

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My benchmark is this: If they're a startup, then I want at least %1equity on a fully diluted basis in stock options!

Also, if they're public, they're not a startup!

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phillmv 20 hours ago | link

Uhm, I think you lost the game when you had a BADGE to coverup.

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Sukotto 19 hours ago | link

If you have a name badge, it's not a startup.

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Google never actually claims they're a startup, they just say theywant to be like a startup.

There're varying degrees of success at this, ranging from "if Isquint really hard, I could almost see it" to "Yeah...I don't thinkso." But I give 'em props for trying, as most companies with 30kemployees don't even make the effort.

BTW, I could go all the way up to the VP level within the Searchbigwigs and they'd be able to answer this.

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tytso 20 hours ago | link

I have to agree with your last point. IBM is a "well run" company; theytake very good care of their shareholders. Some of the things they haveto do in order to take care of shareholders is one of the reasons why I nolonger work there. But I still hold on to my IBM stock....

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pmiller2 7 hours ago | link

Can you elaborate regarding "taking care of shareholders" and whythose things contributed to you not wanting to work there?

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You last few statement sum up my feelings too. I am curious to see, howlong they can get away with poor conditions for Devs. It still amazes methat they get away with it.

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I think there are huge numbers of low level, new, or just... B and Clevel developers who come in to fill the ranks. A lot of the best devsat Amazon, when I was there, were indians who had to keepworking at Amazon as it was the only way they could stay inAmerica. I felt a bit sorry for them (and of course, from theirperspective, Amazon might have been great compared to thealternative.)

This country really needs a damn visa for technologists, orsomething.

Anyway, at some point software development became a verypopular career choice and so there is an endless supply of warmbodies graduating from colleges each year, all of whom know the



Amazon brand and think working there would be really cool.

replysimplekoala 10 hours ago | link

I kind of agree. They are at a stage, where their treatment of developers doesn'tmatter much. Walmart treats it employees miserably but they are doing quitewell, and rakes ginormous profits. The way a company treats its employees saysa lot about management. Amazon's top level management is super sharp. Theyare not idiots. It is not like they don't get it. The fact is they don't give a shit. Aslong as you are a success story, no-one really cares. If it ain't broken don't fix it.If there is an objective way to measure developer happiness across all top tech-companies, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon ends up dead last.

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SoupIce 1 day ago | link

> of course, and I had to do it- RIGHT THAT MINUTE- in the middle of the night.

There is your problem right there. Why in your sane mind would you even consider fixing it atthat moment? You should have told them to FUCK OFF - right at that minute - and gone backto sleep. Right there and then a loud and sound go fuck a rake and fuck off.

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You're absolutely right. It would have meant I lost my job. When Bezos is posting on aticket, everyone knows it. All the pressure rolled downhill right onto me. This meansthat, even if I did tell them to fuck off, I wouldn't have been able to get back to sleep.On some level I would have felt I was shirking my duties, and after all, I'd lobbied hardto get it fixed, months before.

I think, ultimately, it is kind of like an abusive relationship. People stay in thembecause they are manipulated by the abuser. Amazon has a manipulative corporateculture. It's a little bit like a cult.

I'm actually a bit hesitant to talk about this, even years later, because I expect to beattacked for it. (But I'm still pissed off, years later. And I don't really hold grudges,normally.)

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chernevik 22 hours ago | link

I _hope_ I would I told my boss to check his email. Then I'd send him, cc:Bezos, a copy of the email from two months ago. I'd note that I'd done _my_job, and that I wouldn't be _told_ to do someone else's, for free. If this meant Iwasn't their kind of employee then they weren't my kind of employer.

I don't know that I'd actually have the stones for it. But that would be the rightchoice. I imagine you'd agree, better to get fired, then and there, than be pissedabout it for years.

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bronson 11 hours ago | link

Any time you make your boss look like a chump, you lose.

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> I think, ultimately, it is kind of like an abusive relationship.

That is exactly what it is. I hope that your posting here will get read by lots ofpeople at amazon that are treated like you were (or worse?) and that it will opentheir eyes.

One problem of being in an abusive relationship is that you no longer see it assuch.

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look_lookatme 21 hours ago | link

I wouldn't have told them to fuck off, but I'd have thought long and hard aboutthe politics of the situation and what sort of edge I have (if my situation was asdire as yours was made to be). It seems like that could have been yourmoment.

You don't like politics, but it seems like at some point you have to come to termswith the necessity of politics to effect change in a situation, that is to say if it'sworth it. You clearly have an opinion on how things should be done. Bottlingthat sort of stuff up is toxic.

Anyway, glad you are out of that mess.

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I think in a healthy, functioning, company there is some politics. Thething about amazon is, it doesn't matter to anyone that I had pointedthis out months ago. From my boss up to the person who reported toBezos, every one of them would be embarrassed by it, but what could Ido? Threaten to tell Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. He was in the ticket andthey were all pointing the finger at me. Me coming back and say "But, Ipointed it out months ago"... would result in "therefore its your faultbecause you weren't persuasive enough!"

You can't make people take responsibility. Hell, Bezos would probably sayI should have made the change anyway "You failed to take initiative". Butif I had made the change, I would have been fired "You're not a teamplayer".

Asscovering is the rule of the day and its very easy in that environment.

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> ""But, I pointed it out months ago"... would result in "thereforeits your fault because you weren't persuasive enough!""

And then this would get noted in your performance review.

Weakness: bias for action.

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Absolutely. Hell, at one point, praise for me from a formermanager in a performance review was twisted around andused against me.

If I never hear the phrase "Bias for action" again, I'll behappy. (Though I laughed when you used it.)

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LOL at bias of action :) Reminds me of ex-manager'sparrotry of Amazon's values

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GryMor 11 hours ago | link

Making the code capable of the correct (but apparently not desiredbehavior), with a simple flag to turn it on is often the right solution(when you've received insurmountable push back, "Disagree andCommit!"). At that point, you document it in an oncall wiki andwhen someone finally decides it's actually a bug (or the people thatsaid no 'go away'), it's sitting there with a good audit trail so youcan tell your teams oncall one or two words and they can flip it



over in a few minutes (after some QA). Note: I only learned thisafter surviving a really bad manager. I'm not saying you shouldhave known to do it.

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Steer 14 hours ago | link

Nirvana, I'm very impressed by your latest answer which shows a lot of maturityand knowledge about yourself. It is so very easy to write "well, I would have toldthem to fuck off", but in my experience very few people do that in reality,regardless of what they say when not in that specific situation.

I agree that it is quite like an abusive relationship which is of course why youshould get the hell out of there. Nothing you say or do will change the otherpart in the relationship (amazon in this case) and you should just learn yourlessons and move on.

Although your employment at Amazon is not something that you look back onwith fond feelings perhaps you can agree that it is something that has taughtyou a lot and in that regard was a good thing for you?

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davedx 22 hours ago | link

Having worked for companies like this, I know exactly what you mean. Even theanger, 3-4 years after leaving one of them, is still there. It's a bit crazy, butthen, this is somewhere you spend 1/2 of your waking life....

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> I'm actually a bit hesitant to talk about this, even years later, because Iexpect to be attacked for it.

A bit unfair, don't you think? There have been several HN threads aboutAmazon in the last few months where former employees chimed in, and nobodyhas been maligned for it.

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I have mentioned this in the past, on HN, though much more briefly, andwas attacked for it. (Though this was on a previous HN account.)

I don't consider HN to be a very receptive environment, especially ifyou're saying anything perceived as "negative" about certain companies,including Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. Though it varies widely, ofcourse.

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dasil003 18 hours ago | link

Unfair to whom? It'd say it's more like PTSD.

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buff-a 11 hours ago | link

Saying "No" to my boss on a significant issue that got me fired was the mostimportant thing I have ever done in my life.

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jarek 9 hours ago | link

Re: the abusive relationship, that's exactly how a lot of bad employmentsituations work. The parallels are pretty much perfect. This post really openedmy eyes about how this kind of situation is set up:http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

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sethg 16 hours ago | link

I think that in general, when you’re in a toxic work environment, you either realize it’stoxic or you don’t. If you don’t realize it’s toxic, then you are likely to assume thatanything the boss blames on you really is your own fault, so you try to be a good teamplayer, which is generally inconsistent with telling the boss to fuck off. If you do realizeit’s toxic, then you will be looking for another job—but you don’t want to do anythingthat would get you fired before you can quit with dignity.

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badclient 17 hours ago | link

So why does anyone good work at Amazon? And if the only people left at amazon are mostcrappy people willing to take the abuse, how can they build such a thriving company?

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vl 11 hours ago | link

They actually do pay shitload of money to senior and especially principal people, mostlyin the form of stock grants. They have really strange vesting schedule too: somethinglike 5% first year, 5% second, 45% third, 45% fourth. To compensate for the droppedincome they give you sign-up bonus for first and second years.

I left before my first vest as soon as interesting start up showed up (start up didn'tsurvive, but at least it was fun).

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e40 11 hours ago | link

Interestingly, 3 times in the last 2 days, I've had the amazon.com website give me a 404 ona link on one of their pages. I don't remember ever getting a 404 on their site. In all theyears I've been using them, which is a long time.

Your rant paints a bleak picture, and I hope my experience of the last 2 days was coincidence.

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mdaniel 15 hours ago | link

It's rare that you can find candid descriptions of what it's like to work somewhere.... sinceSteve felt free to be candid, I figured I'd share my experiences.

FWIW, I believe this is the exact kind of thing that glassdoor.com wants to hear.

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nhashem 1 day ago | link

What really struck home for me was Steve's line, "I hate... plussing" because I actually think hisentries like this one are a great niche for Google Plus -- it's basically a built-in blogging platform/RSSreader. Facebook and Twitter are pretty bad platforms for posting 5 paragraphs (or 25 paragraphs, inSteve's case) worth of thoughts, but Google Plus works pretty well. It has all the sharing/socialgoodness of those platforms without the overhead of having to create your own blog and tell peopleabout it.

So I thought about a web application that would basically provide a wrapper to post blog-esqueentries on Google Plus, and sure enough I looked up the API, and like Steve, you pretty much justget the Stalker Method[0]. Not a POST method to be found.

Then it made me recall an earlier life where I worked on an SEM optimization platform, and the mostcommon thing we heard from our Google Rep was, "oh, um, yeah, doing that is not available in ourAPI."

Short of a directive from Larry and Sergey and the willingness to follow through for the 3-5 years ittook Amazon to reap dividends, is there anything Google can do?

[0] https://developers.google.com/+/api/

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ellyagg 17 hours ago | link



You too, huh? That's what I do now. Our company's been a paying user of Google's APIs for acouple years, and it's been a nightmare the whole time: Inadequate features, bogus data,weird malfunctions, etc.

replyj_baker 6 hours ago | link

Which API? Not that I think Google's APIs are all brilliant, but on the whole, I cursethem much less than I do some other companies' APIs (like Facebook and just aboutanything by Yahoo).

But then again, the quality of their APIs varies pretty wildly from product to product.

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tedunangst 19 hours ago | link

Facebook has had a Notes feature for just about forever. Most people ignore it, but I know afew people who use it as a sort of blog platform.

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pragmatic 19 hours ago | link

What's ironic is that Amazon is "so bad" yet they are one of my favorite companies.

They always seem to do right by the customer.

Where as google, it's behavior isn't always customer friendly (disclaimer: this is myopinion/perception).

To an outsider like me, Google seems almost schizophrenic...adding features, removing them, andthen Gmail on android is just "not good". Customer service is non existent. Have a problem withGoogle product, good luck buddy.

Contrast that to Amazon where customer service is prompt and courteous and they always give thecustomer the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe it's the focus of the companies? Google is focused on engineering for engineering's sake. Thefocus on developers and algorithms.

Amazon is focused on customer service/satisfaction. Keeping the customers coming back.

Google is a monopoly in many of it's services (search, ad[sense|words]) whereas you can get a lot ofAmazon's products somewhere else.

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wouterinho 1 day ago | link

It seems to 404 now, a copy is available athttps://raw.github.com/gist/933cc4f7df97d553ed89/24386c6a79b...

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estel 23 hours ago | link

He's posted saying that it was meant to be available internally only, but didn't set hispermissions correctly:

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/bwJ7kAEL...

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It's a pity that he chose to withdraw it, it would be great if high profile people like Stevecould say stuff like this and stand by it without having to fear for fall-out. After all, thebig winners from a piece like this are Google and Amazon, Amazon obviously havesome big problems (see Nirvana's post above) and the sooner it gets to the attention oftheir top level execs the better.

Stuff like this can rot your company from the inside out, and being transparent about it(and even public) can help a lot.

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david927 21 hours ago | link

Wow. I know so little about the internal workings of Google and had such a goodimpression of them until today. The Wave post and now this -- not the postwhich was constructive and insightful, no company is perfect and it's importantto examine flaws -- but for the decision to pull the post. Shameful. Steve is onlywrong with one point: Google's reputation for arrogance seems actually well-deserved.

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Well, the google PR people actually didn't do anything to tell him towithdraw the post, so that is his own decision.

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This is one of the very few times I've seen Steve back-off of aprovocative statement; whatever made that happen does not bodewell for Google and I think my point stands.

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someone13 19 hours ago | link

I don't get the impression that he was "forced" to back off,but rather that he accidentally posted something that wasmeant for internal consumption in public. I think it'sperfectly within his rights to delete the post - most peopledon't talk the same way with their co-workers as they do inpublic, and it's perfectly understandable.

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I completely get that now, and I retract mycomments. I'm sorry if I cast any undue aspersions.

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It may have been a case of not wanting to embarrass hisformer employer, Amazon.

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That absolutely could be. I shouldn't judge. Apologies.

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Kind of ironic given that this was the very thing that Google+ was supposed to dobetter than Facebook...

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tytso 16 hours ago | link

It wasn't that he set his permissions properly, it was that he posted using the wrongaccount (corporate account vs. personal account).

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RyanMcGreal 20 hours ago | link

Steve is not asking people who shared his original post to take their copies down. Here's areshare by Rip Rowan:

https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesv...

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buu700 23 hours ago | link

Here's another mirror: http://buu700.com/steverant

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speedracr 22 hours ago | link

Thanks! Out of curiousity: Were you expecting this to go offline? Somehow there'salways at least one HN member caching a good article :)

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buu700 4 hours ago | link

Haha, actually I just happened to have it open in a separate tab when I readpeople saying it 404'd, though I do have a habit of saving loads of randomthings to my ~/Public/ NFS share when browsing HN and reddit.

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przemoc 23 hours ago | link

"You're over the rate limit. Serve this file from your own servers. [email protected] if you have questions."

EDIT: Looks like fixed now.

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arkitaip 23 hours ago | link

Exceeding the rate limit with a text file? Good job.

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aab1d 23 hours ago | link

Thanks for the link!

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msg 12 hours ago | link

Amazon engineer here, just a couple of observations after a few years at the company.

As many people said, there's a wide variability in experience at Amazon depending on the team. AndI would say even more, depending on where you sit in the graph. The bottlenecks at the centerhave more clients, higher TPS, more stringent latency requirements. And their support burden isworse and the engineer's life is worse. It's hard to move everyone forward together. Once you addenough constraints the problem gets too hard to solve. But like working at Microsoft, you pay theseprices in order to have high impact, a high number of customers, and high influence. A big questionfor large service federations like Amazon is how to smooth out these bottlenecks. Like Stevey's rantabout code size though, first you have to admit you have the problem, service size.

I joined with a team that was not service oriented. It was like a collection of cron jobs that ran singlethreaded applications directly updating the DB. It was painful and very hard to alter these statefulapplications without breaking things.

I moved to a team that ran a collection of services and it was so much better, like night and daybetter. The path forward for us became obvious when we started thinking about how to migratebetween APIs and decompose our services still further (and by the way, our support burden iscomparatively low).

What makes service oriented architecture at Amazon great is that it is cheap. The other two Amazonadvantages Steve mentioned are not coincidences, they are what you need to make service rolloutslow-friction. They are what makes it possible to shoot first and rollback later. With rare exceptionsthey are used by the entire company.

Remember Sinofsky's "don't ship the org chart"? It is a lie. You cannot avoid it. You always ship theorg chart. So the real question is, what is the org going to look like so that we ship something good-looking? That's the real purpose of Steve's rant. No matter how much politicking or boosting you dofor this important service-oriented architecture, it doesn't work unless you have a service-orientedorg chart. And Google does not, apparently.



The big big question for the internet and decades in the future is, you say you're going to organizethe world's information. What is the organization going to look like? I think it'll be more interactive.The API will be there, there will be writes. It will be less centralized, with the appropriate authoritiesowning data and providing an interface to their small piece of the world's information. I think that'seventually going to mean you own your identity and provide as much interface as you care to. Thearc of the internet is long but it bends toward decentralization (assuming we keep it out of thehands of the fascists).

For me Amazon is a microcosm of that future, and it's going to be interesting to lead the way there.

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limist 9 hours ago | link

Very informative and well-written post, thank you. Nice evolution of the MLK quote.

What I'm wondering next is, What is the practical take-away for startups and relatively smallefforts that are looking to scale? Regardless of tools-stack, what should a forward-thinkingdeveloper do? Is the answer to design around a RESTful API specification right from thebeginning, then building layers of server-side and client-side code exclusively using that API?etc. etc.

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msg 4 hours ago | link

It's a little hard to talk about this broad topic without bloviating. Here goes.

So first, take that stuff Steve said about extensibility to heart. He has another blogsomewhere, oh here it is

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht...

about software that is alive because it's extensible. That is true of your startup too. Youdon't want to be a "site", you want to be a "service". And that means you want to bean authority for a unique kind of data, that you want your users to create and use.

I think the Google+ data is pretty unique and cool. I like the user experience. But youcan't call it a service, which is bad news until they get their crap together.

I'm a strong believer that flowing data puts pressure on software to work correctly. Youwant a public API because you don't assume that you and your team are world classgeniuses who have exhausted the search space of valid use cases for your data... butyour customers can, close enough. (A very Amazon virtue: start with the customer.)

You want to have a well-designed interface for yourself and your users because it's sopainful to scale, migrate, control security, etc. without it. So sure, I would say startwith it as early as you can stand. Make it public as soon as you can. Allow your users tocontribute and build on your data and service.

You'll probably treat your public-facing interfaces with different levels of scrutiny thaninternal-only ones. This is convenient, but it might be a mistake. You don't want to putoff security or user data integrity until it's too late.

Having multiple services means that you can scale them independently. This costssome overhead but you'll be able to right-size your hardware, say with appropriatefleets in EC2.

Sorry that's all kind of generic, but that's about as deep as I would go without a real-world example to talk about.

The High Scalability blog is one I would recommend at the leading edge of this thing. Isee posts on the front page alone that cover all I've been talking about and more.

http://highscalability.com/

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flinty 5 hours ago | link

Hi msg, Since you worked on SOA projects what book/resource would you recommend tobuild an app from the ground up to be service oriented. Thanks



replywouterinho 1 day ago | link

Werner Vogels did an on-stage interview recently at the Kings of Code conference in Amsterdam. Aquestion from the audience was: "Does the Amazon shopping site run on AWS as well or on a moreprivate/shielded AWS-cloud?". Werner answered that they use the same infrastructure as everybodyelse and that they could not justify doing anything else. It gave me tremendous trust in the AWSplatform.

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This was not true at all, at least thru 2007. At that time, there were some minor servicesthat made some use of AWS services, mostly newer things that had been created after AWSwas created.

AWS was not available to developers within Amazon to use at any time before the day it waspublicly launched. At least not on a broad basis, and none of the main Amazon.com servicesran on it in 2007.

They did share some data centers, however. And I guess data centers are "infrastructure".

I was in a position to know this because I had my hands deep in the retail site as part of myjob.

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Interesting... any current Amazon employee that can confirm/deny this? Perhapsthings have changed since 2007.

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I'm sure sometime in 2007 or 2008 a directive went down that people had tobuild new stuff on AWS. EC2 is a reasonably good fit for much of theAmazon.com code, as it's just generic hardware. I'm sure in the past 4 yearsmore and more stuff has been written to use S3 as a data store. The core stuff,Gurupa, etc, would have to be re-architected to work with things like SQS andother services.

I'm not saying that nobody in Amazon wanted to use AWS, just that we didn'tknow about it until the press release, and so there wasn't any opportunity touse it... and of course, all the code from the 1990s was built in a different wayso it would have been nontrivial to migrate it.

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We migrated the US retail rendering fleet to AWS last year. simonw posted a linkabout it elsewhere on this thread.

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So, about 4 years after it was publicly claimed to be running on AWS.

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nikcub 19 hours ago | link

yes but we all figured this out earlier because EC2 and S3downtime would never correspond with Amazon.com downtime -which made it obvious that the 'use the infrastructure we use' linewas complete bullshit.

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ceejayoz 14 hours ago | link

Not necessarily. Netflix managed to survive EC2 and S3



downtimes by architecting around the (mostly known)pitfalls - multiple regions, S3 isn't HA, etc.

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jonjenk 22 hours ago | link

This presentation contains some fairly detailed information about theamazon.com migration to AWS.

tl;dr The organic migration to AWS started in 2006 and continues to this day.

http://psav.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7ab95f6a5d4...

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jasoncrawford 1 day ago | link

When I left in early 2007 they were working on the transition. More recently Iheard that they were substantially if not totally on the AWS infrastructure. So ifWerner said it recently it probably is true.

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freedompeace 23 hours ago | link

Amazon Silk uses the EC2 infrastructure -- they explicitly state this in theirvideo ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk )

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syaramak 23 hours ago | link

Some of the vendor facing systems I worked on definitely were not on AWS by thetime I left in 2008. And there wasn't any plan on the map to migrate them at thetime. But that was 3 years ago.

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csarva 16 hours ago | link

At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered viaservers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC,Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.

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simonw 23 hours ago | link

Here's a presentation about Amazon.com moving to AWS as of November 2010:http://lanyrd.com/2011/aws-cloud-tour-2011-sydney/sgqfb/

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ryanpers 1 day ago | link

when i left amazon in 2006 that was MOST DEF not true. well not the backendy parts ofamazon. maybe some of the webservers were, but i somehow doubt it.

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rtuck 22 hours ago | link

I remember the question more in terms of "Does AWS give preferential treatment to Amazonvs other customers?" to which the answer was, of course, "No, it's not workable at such ascale." I imagine there was a large amount of hardware sharing early on and that could beconstrued as sharing infrastructure; a number of the answers in that session were ratherevasive.

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espeed 13 hours ago | link

Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :)

A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at firstglance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on



Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig atGoogle. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in catpictures.

Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one --"Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google andFacebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras."

Maybe Steve is Google's new unofficial recruiting agent. He makes reference to it here, "I actuallydid a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruitingloved it."

When you think about it, he's the perfect person to have run a psyop designed to get theFacebookers and Amazonians to lay down their cat pictures and join the Googlers building the nextgeneration platform, while partaking in all of their perks. Google can just play it off as, "oh, that'sjust crazy uncle Steve on one of his rants again". I don't know what it is, but I think it's great onmultiple levels :)

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latch 21 hours ago | link

The rant is absolute gold. It is well written, it's entertaining, it's funny, it's insightful. Mostimportantly, it's right (about platforms at least, and from what I've heard, about Amazon andGoogle's culture). It is as near to perfect as a rant can probably ever get.

I can see "What did you think of Steve's Google Platform rant" as an interview question.

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twoodfin 19 hours ago | link

Agree. The only Yegge rant/essay I can remember getting all the way through withoutstruggling to stay awake. It's amazing how much more effective a writer he is when he's nottrying to construct an elaborate metaphor. Maybe it has something to do with his belief thathe was writing to a smaller, more focused audience.

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bambax 1 day ago | link

What he says about Chrome doesn't seem to be really true?

> And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size

You can set the default font size and zoom size in Chrome (chrome://settings/advanced then "WebContent").

But more to the point, although it's obvious Google Search is trying very hard NOT to be a platform,it would seem Chrome is already a platform.

No other browser in history has had a more straightforward way to build extensions -- and, for thatmatter, apps.

Also, Yahoo is not mentioned; Yahoo built many nice platforms (remember Pipes?) and it didn't quitesave them.

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hollerith 18 hours ago | link

>You can set the default font size and zoom size in Chrome (chrome://settings/advancedthen "Web Content").

Increasing the default font size makes some text a lot bigger while other text stays small. OnMailman archives, for example, the body of an email ends up smaller than all the other texton the page (maybe because the body is in a fixed-width font).

Specifically, if you set the default font size to "Very large", the text in the body ends up lessthan half the size of the other text.

On hacker news, the "reply" links, which are (rightfully IMHO) smaller than normal text,become much larger than normal text.



The other way to increase text size in Chrome, the Zoom In command in the View menu, isnot useful to me either: when I use the Zoom In command to get the text size to where Iwant it, the text usually runs past the right end of the window, with the result that I have toscroll horizontally back and forth for every line of text I want to read.

On some pages, this problem occurs when I use the Zoom In command only twice (repeateduses continue to increase the text size) and the text is still pretty small after two uses of theZoom In command.

I have not been able to find any usable way to have the text as big as I want it in Chrome.

replybasugasubaku 17 hours ago | link

Have you tried setting Minimum font size also to "Very large"?

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hollerith 13 hours ago | link

I have now, and it works well enough for me tentatively to make Chrome mydefault browser. Thanks!

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catch23 1 day ago | link

Well like steve mentioned -- you can't just have a platform and hope it will save you. Youneed a killer app on top first...

The only killer app I can think of from yahoo is mail & flickr.

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zobzu 19 hours ago | link

You can't set the DPI in Chrome. I'm guessing its what they wanted to mean there. Whenyou need a non-standard DPI you just can't read Chrome's fonts. If you boost the font sizeother elements are not properly proportioned.

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vnorby 16 hours ago | link

When I worked at Myspace, there was one (small) team dedicated to creating and maintaininginternal services. The platform was called "slayer," short for service layer. It was built very well, forthe most part. All the documentation and calls were in one place. And the few teams who used itbuilt cool products (including my own) that leveraged data from a wide variety of services.

I think the simple reason that our products were better was because we could easily see all the datasources available to us every time we checked the documentation to do some simple things (say,retrieving a user's data). We can get friends data from here, music data from here, analytics fromthere. And what do you know, putting all that data into one place can make a cool product orfeature. Without that, you spend so much time worrying about what your own product and team isdoing that you forget about working together.

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erraggy 9 hours ago | link

Wow, thanks @vnorby! That was my team. We started out in the beginning of 2007 withmyself and 2 other devs and we were just the "API Team". Our goal was to simplify andstandardize data access for all front-end features. At that time, this was a monumental taskas most features lacked common code besides the infamous MaintenanceConfig. There wasbasic SQL call wrappers for querying data and some core handling of the large number offederated profile/mail DBs, but besides that, features tended to be built ad hoc.

This posed a problem to scaling the massive web traffic load on these databases. It also leftopen dangerous patterns of duplicate data calls where each control on a page was making itsown calls for the data it would bind to.

Man... I could go on for days about the path we took from the wild wild west of code slingingup to the nice accessible, maintainable, freakin' BEAUTIFUL Server Slayer platform. Instead,let me just leave you with the logo we designed for this internal platform:



http://imgur.com/Pvpy7

\m/ -- robbie API Development Mgr. MySpace 2/2007 - 3/2010

replymaxwin 22 hours ago | link

"Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highestlevels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leafworkers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your OwnDogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last Ichecked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about itwhen they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." Imean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess thejoke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culturefor a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doingthat is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are allabout long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notionthat Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they aresuccessful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowingother people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their timeon Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands ofdifferent high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need somegames. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see howincredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people wantand deliver it for them.

You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, overthe entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them.We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't."

Interesting comment on Google+ as a platform. I love google products. There will be lots ofinnovation (gmail, google voice, g+ etc) if google provides good APIs to external developers and treatthese APIs as first class citizens.

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thurn 19 hours ago | link

Facebook doesn't even come close to eating their own dogfood. They extensively make use ofprivate APIs, and their commitment to platform developers is legendarily poor. I do agree thatFacebook's success going forward will be increasingly dependent on their platform, however.

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RobPfeifer 15 hours ago | link

This. The fb platform is fine for small start-ups who don't have any expectation of SLAs,or huge partners like Zynga who drive their profits or traffic. But I'm at a $600mecommerce company and we've found their platform to be a disaster. APIs don't work,questions are answered months later by interns who know next to nothing. I knowthey spend a ton of money/time on it, but it's seems mostly internal facing at themoment.

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liuliu 11 hours ago | link

True. But I think that Facebook is making effort to dogfooding its Graph API, notably,its mobile website and mobile apps are all built off its Graph API (Yes, there are fewprivate API calls, but I don't think that's a big deal as long as "private APIs" don't havefunctional collision with public ones).

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ilamont 23 hours ago | link

No mention of Android. I know it was an acquisition, but Google built it out into a platform. Yes, ithas flaws, but overall I would consider it a success.

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georgemcbay 16 hours ago | link

His point wasn't that Google has no platforms, he specifically mentions a few groups in Googlethat do get it right and anybody that has used the gdata APIs for those products would agreethat they really are quite nice to use as a third party developer when compared to a typicalweb API.

His point was that there shouldn't be so much variation on this from team to team and theyshould strive to make these platform services a cultural core part of the company.

I totally agree with his point, though I'm coming from the outsider perspective. I was reallyjazzed to hear they finally released an API for Google+ and then crushed to realize it wascompletely worthless for almost any task. They've recently released an updated API, adding insome very basic search stuff.. but the API is still worthless. Hopefully within a year or sothey'll have an API that isn't completely worthless, but it would have been nice if they hadone from the start and if they internalized the API culture Steve is talking about, this wouldhave been a no-brainer because the API would be an integral part of the service from top tobottom instead of something being slowly bolted on later.

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adhipg 15 hours ago | link

Android in itself is a successful mobile operating system and has a great install base.

However, I will not call it successful in context of the article above. Android as an operatingsystem has not done anything to drive people to use Google's other (paid?) services - which iswhat you aim from a platform. You build your company's other products around it - like whatApple does by creating their own paid iOS apps to an extent. There have been numerousarticles where people speculate if Chrome or Android is Google's future with Chrome comingout ahead all the time.

The fact that vendors and manufacturers put in their own layers of UI and apps etc. on top ofAndroid makes it Google's platform even less. Oh, and I have not touched Kindle Fire as yet!

The fact there is in fact a debate about what should be the flagship platform (Chrome vsAndroid) for your company is not a good sign.

Lastly, what's the deal with Android not having Chrome as it's browser?

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bonzoesc 21 hours ago | link

A success by what standard, because it's probably not profit.

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ilamont 20 hours ago | link

I was thinking of installed base (48% in the U.S. in August, compared to 23% for iOS,source http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma... ) andapplications, but revenue is (or was late last year) part of the picture, too, viaadvertising:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Android-based phones already generate enough newadvertising revenue to cover the cost of the software’s development.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/10/03/how-android...

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ellyagg 17 hours ago | link

The numbers you mention were for smartphones alone. The source you citeclaims total iOS device install rate is slightly higher than Android.

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martincmartin 23 hours ago | link

Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobodycan understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels ...

When I interviewed at Amazon, they were at pains to point out that the company is data driven.One person told me that even Bezos would put a lot of weight in numbers that disagreed with isintuition. Is Steve's anecdote an outlier, or is Amazon not really data driven at all?

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It's like the bible, once you collect enough data, you can find a passage that supportswhatever belief you are trying to defend. Being "data driven" is one of the company slogans("Its day one!") and there's a lot of people who believe that stuff. On some levels its verytrue. Some groups are very data driven. In other situations, due in part to Sarbanes Oxeley,you couldn't get at data that was being collected and relevant to your efforts because you hadto get a VP to sign off on it.

Data was used to bolster opinions, but unless it was hard and fast proof, it was often ignoredas well.

I don't think Larry's results were considered "real" data.

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locacorten 14 hours ago | link

There is one thing that Google has done well that no other company (Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook)seems to understand. Hire experts. They call this hire Ph.D.'s, but that's slightly inaccurate becausehaving a Ph.D. does not make you an expert. They understand that building systems at large scalerequires people who have a deep understanding of distributed systems that goes much beyond "Mycode is on SourceForge" mentality, or "Git is better than SVN because it is a distributed repository".

To this day, I am still shocked as to how many devs have no clue on what I'm talking about, yetthey are in charge of Internet-scale systems. Here's a list of symptoms, I've heard over the years:

- I'll put something quick together.

- I implemented Paxos last night.

- I found an optimization in the two-phase commit protocol.

In my opinion, being expert means becoming humble and doubtful about your code whenimplementing large-scale systems. If your code runs on thousands of machines and serves 100K+people and you think you rock as a developer/architect then you're doing something wrong.

Facebook doesn't get this. Look at their systems. They barely work. Good thing it doesn't matter.Yet. But it will eventually.

Amazon gets a little of this. Bringing Werner showed signs that they started to get it. They are stillin this mix where a small group of people gets it and continues to bring in experts and push amazingthings out. We'll see how long this will last.

Microsoft clearly doesn't get it. But that's ok, because they have no Internet-scale systems anyway.They built MSR which is capable of building such systems, but they make sure MSR remains isolatedfrom their code. MSR seems happy to have no role in the company and to continue to publishamazing research.

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radagaisus 23 hours ago | link

He has a new 'clarifying' post on his wall: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts

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TruthPrevails 19 hours ago | link

Hello All,

I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant withgreat interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him aboutAmazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently



interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Googlephone screening last week. It was just not my day :( I am confident of getting MS offer. Do youpeople suggest I reject the Amazon offer? Or should I work at Amazon and form my own opinion? Ican always change jobs.

EDIT: I am not able to reply to comments at all! It gives me dead link message. I have been tryingfor almost 30 mins now. Frustrating.

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Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship.

I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all bigcompanies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working forAmazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on. That will be the difference between a hellon earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job.

From your internship, you have much more information than most people coming into thecompany. Use that.

And even if it does turn out to be the wrong decision, the golden handcuffs are only on for12-24 months. Amazon on your resume is incredibly powerful and opens a lot of doors, soyou won't really have suffered in the long run for it. Towards the end of my tenure I hadrecruiters banging down my door, so your options even if Amazon turns out to be a bad fitare, well, pretty limitless.

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eljorgito 4 hours ago | link

any advice for people considering a move to Amazon but haven't had the benefit ofinternship or view from the inside. it's clear that group to group variance is enormous -hell on earth vs pretty sweet - but getting clarity on the particular group is key todecision. it's possible to get some of that through the recruiting process but not thesame as spending time there.

also curious as to whether the hellishness everyone talks about applies cross-org (egfor PMs, TPMs, etc.) as well as engineers.

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This is quite comforting :)

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Be-prepared for the worst. They are some specific groups which do good work,and have good management. If you luck out, you can have fun working atAmazon but if you end up getting into painful groups with extreme operationalload or bad management - just keep your head down, slog it out, suck up toyour boss. You will end-up learning a ton by being at Amazon, if you are just outof school. It will help you immensely in your next job search.

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maestri 15 hours ago | link

I was kind of in a similar position a couple years ago. I didn't do an internship at Amazon, butI was considering joining full-time, and was really unsure of whether to accept (I had greatoffers from a couple startups, which I was mostly focused on at the time, but a friend atAmazon was really pushing for me to join).

In the end, I decided to go with Amazon, thinking like you are that I could always change jobsif I didn't like it.

And yeah, I hated it. Absolutely hated it so much that I quit two months after joining. Theproblem was that the other startups I was interested had filled the position I'd been looking at(I'm more of a data analyst than a software engineer, and data analyst positions are a little



more rare), and now every other place I'd interview at would think I was a total flake. I'dinterview somewhere, and I'd have to spend 30 minutes explaining to multiple people why Ileft Amazon so soon and how they'd know I wouldn't do that again at their place.

I'd have great technical interviews, and I would get told this, but people would be worriedabout what kind of employee I was simply because of this one mistake I made joiningAmazon.

So yeah. Hopefully you'll have a much better experience than me, so that even if you don'tlike Amazon you can always change jobs, but just throwing my own experience out there asanother data point.

replySoftwareMaven 10 hours ago | link

The lesson here is don't quit two months into a new job before finding a replacementposition. "The position isn't what I thought it would be" sounds much different if youare still there than if you've quit. Very few people will begrudge an incompatible matchif you are seen as sticking it out responsibly.

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srdev 18 hours ago | link

Keep in mind that Amazon is a big place, and your mileage can vary greatly depending onwhich team you are in. Personally, there are some good and bad points with my team (andpager duty always sucks), but overall I'm not discontent. I'm not sure about the pay-scaleclaims though. I had thought that I was being paid pretty well, and cross checking againstexternal sites seemed to confirm that.

You can also just take the job at Amazon and switch to the MS offer if you get it and don't likewhat you see at Amazon. Its considered incredibly rude, yes, but our group has had thatpulled on us a couple of times.

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tybris 16 hours ago | link

Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge leftcenturies ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in.You should base your decision on your internship.

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Yes, this is something even I observed as an intern. Amazon environment is verydynamic and chaotic (at least the group I interned in was).

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skyo 14 hours ago | link

I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, likeother people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team youjoin. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internshipon. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to knowwhich teams suck and which teams are great, and so I chose a great team to join. Hopefullyyou are in a similar place because of your internship. Did you enjoy your team? If not, did yousee any teams that you would like to work on?

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My AWS team was good. I enjoyed my work as an intern. However I was warned thatwork in the group is operations intensive. I could see that myself in those 12 weeks. Asan intern I was not given any operations work. Obviously it will change when I join asa full timer. As noted below I am looking at other AWS teams, Kindle silk browserteam. I need to find out about these teams.

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skyo 11 hours ago | link



Yeah, I've heard that some AWS teams can have heavy operational load. If it'simportant to you to avoid that, you could consider somewhere inWAP/BuilderTools. That's where I work (so yes I am biased), and in myexperience the operational load tends to be pretty light throughout the org. Onmy particular team we almost never get paged. Plus we get to build neat thingsin this org (remember how Stevey mentioned that Amazon's "versioned-library"system is good?).

Silk is probably a neat team to look into as well. They're building a cool product,they're still a small team, and they have good leadership. The director in chargeof it used to be the head of Builder Tools and he's great.

But yeah, talk to a lot of teams and ask them about the things that areimportant to you (operational load, current/future projects, code qualitystandards, whatever other things you can think of to ask) and see if any ofthose teams sound cool to you. I won't lie and say that every place in Amazon isperfect, but if you choose well I think it's possible to find a great team to workon.

replyTruthPrevails 10 hours ago | link

Just now found out that "no college hires" in Silk team. That sucks!College hires are high on energy and enthusiasm. I don't know whyteams would not want college hires :(

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Well, what did you think of your internship?

Personally I find Amazon a great place to write software.

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revertts 18 hours ago | link

If you did an internship, you're in a better position than anyone else to decide if thecompany's a good fit...

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Thanks for the suggestions guys. Internship experience was quite good. But then it was justfor 12 weeks. I enjoyed writing code. Since I have less time to decide now, I might justaccept the offer and test the waters. I am inclined to choose one of the good AWS teams orthe Kindle silk browser team (hoping they have plans to turn it into a browser OS in future)

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revertts 13 hours ago | link

There are also a lot of _really_ interesting but less public-facing teams (AWS and Kindletend to get a lot of press). I had been pretty set on AWS when I accepted, but endedup in a different org and love the work I'm doing. You might talk to your recruiter oranyone you know at Amazon about your interests and see if they can suggestadditional orgs/teams to consider.

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Sure, I will try to find out about such teams.

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TheTarquin 13 hours ago | link

I agree with skyo and aphexairlines. I've found Amazon a fantastic place to work and am,frankly, baffled by the flak it's taking here in the comments. My experience at Amazon hasbeen fun and rewarding, and I'm thrilled to be a coder at such an awesome company.



I guess your mileage may vary, but I've found AMZN to be an awesome place to be aprogrammer.

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chubs 23 hours ago | link

My first thought when reading was 'wow, he must be confident about how open to criticism thebosses at google are, to be posting this'.

And now i've come back a few hours later to find his post has been removed...

Let's hope he was right when he claimed he could easily get a job at facebook, for his mortgage'ssake :)

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rryan 10 hours ago | link

Being able to level criticisms at anyone within the company is one of Google's great culturalstrengths. At no point would you ever be fired for having an opinion and expressing it loudly.A long rant to all of engineering CC'd to Larry Page is pretty common and often unleashesmany centi-threads of discussion.

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guelo 20 hours ago | link

It's too bad he screwed up the internal posting. It's a great read for us outsiders but utltimately itjust amounts to industry gossip. But internally the embarrassment might overshadow the impact ofwhat Steve was trying to say.

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estel 23 hours ago | link

Looks like it was supposed to be internal only:https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/bwJ7kAEL...

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iamelgringo 22 hours ago | link

gods, I miss Stevey's drunken rants.

And... after spending an evening looking at Google's calendaring API's... he's got a couple'a points.

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crizCraig 5 hours ago | link

I think this is a bunch of BS. Google didn't have to create a platform, it took control of the world'sbiggest platform. Google benefits from most things built on the web sans Facebook. Now it's leadingthe way in the most promising platform of the next few years with Android. Chrome is a platform.Google+ is a platform for content creation that solves the problem of the Facebook crawl wall. It alsosets the stage for a more complete solution to your problems (aka searches) via increasing itsknowledge on individuals.

I don't think Google will accomplish its goal with plus however, because it's not being aggressiveenough in collecting user data and integrating it with search. I think the Universities are in the bestposition to do this as they did with email and the web. The killer app will be a light bulb that makesextremely useful suggestions based on context.

This rant expounded here: http://www.wepolls.com/p/3740179

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tmsh 17 hours ago | link

google search: 'malcolm gladwell third'.

Sort of relevant. Different mindsets.

I don't completely buy the argument (the marginal utility of learning from the first and seconditeration isn't always as meaningful as you might think) -- but I partly buy the argument. And it'ssort of relevant here. I.e., it's hard to be both inventive and an integrator. Though once you'reaware of the problem it might not be that hard.



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ThomPete 20 hours ago | link

I seriously hope Jeff Bezos reading HN.

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SimHacker 10 hours ago | link

I imagine Amazon's PR department is a couple of orders of magnitude more pissed off at himthan Google's PR department.

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imrehg 1 day ago | link

Seems like it was removed? Too bad I haven't copied it off earlier....

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https://raw.github.com/gist/933cc4f7df97d553ed89/24386c6a79b...

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mattmanser 23 hours ago | link

I mean this in the nicest way, but there's probably a good reason he took it down andit's his work.

So do him a favour and delete the copy. Out of respect to a great writer.

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Steve is a smart guy, and I'm pretty sure he realizes that copies have beenmade and will be available forever and then a bit longer still.

The bit that I don't get: Even if Steve's release was accidental, if you writesomething like this even when it is for internal use only, you can still count on itbeing reposted in a public place. 'All of google' is a large number of people, all ittakes is one copy and the genie will never go back in to the bottle.

If you want to keep something to yourself don't store it on a company websiteor write it out in an email.

Company confidential typically translates into 'delayed, uncontrolled publication'or 'evidence to be used against you' depending on the circumstances.

If you can't stand by your statements in full view then you probably shouldn'tmake them to 10K+ people, especially not when you're a well noted blogger.

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jsnell 18 hours ago | link

There must have been thousands or tens of thousands Google-internalblog posts, Buzzes, emails and now Plus updates about people'sperception of what's horribly wrong with some aspect of Google. AFAIKnone of those leaked widely. Why would this be different?

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Because Steve is very visible. Random googler 'x' giving his opinionis one thing, a guy with the stature of Steve Yegge doing the sameis quite another.

Especially one where he pretty much writes that Google's #1 is not'Steve Jobs'.

Really, I think that no matter what that this would have found itsway to the general public somehow. That said, I think it's greatthat he speaks his mind like this, even if it is intended for an



internal audience only.

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jsnell 16 hours ago | link

Internal blog posts written by Yegge earlier didn't leak afaik.Incendiary technical posts written by people in positions ofpower didn't leak. I mean, not even hints of them, let alonethe full text. Maybe the engineering culture has dramaticallychanged in the last few months, but it used to be the casethat full copying of internal technical discussions to externalforums would have been totally unthinkable.

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wouterinho 22 hours ago | link

I considered it, but seeing as it was out in the open already and Steve's laterremarks, I decided it would not make much difference.

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44Aman 1 day ago | link

Another copy: http://steverant.pen.io/

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babo 20 hours ago | link

That's gone now.

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shahidhussain 20 hours ago | link

https://raw.github.com/gist/933cc4f7df97d553ed89/24386c6a79b... is still up.

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anymoonus 1 day ago | link

I guess Yegge was a little too optimistic about the open-mindedness of the management atGoogle.

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mieses 1 day ago | link

The problem is how to isolate the Google brand and product from the effects of platformization sothat you don't kill the world's best cat while using shock therapy to turn him into a dog.

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rachelbythebay 1 day ago | link

I'm surprised this is an external post.

Stubby services, eh?

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mziulu 1 day ago | link

Yeah it's giving me 404 now...

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rachelbythebay 22 hours ago | link

Ha! Yep. I thought it was a bit too honest for a public post by someone who's stillemployed there.

Of course, maybe he'll be moving on. His very first line was comparing his tenure atAmazon (6.5 years) to "and now I've been at Google for that long". I don't think that'sa coincidence, even if he doesn't consciously realize it yet.

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HN is always trying to fire Steve. He's frustrated that such a good company canbe so bone-headed. Fair enough. He seems also pretty comfy there. That said...

Steve: if you're reading this, go do something better. Google is feeding yourwallet and ego, but life is more important than that. Go. Do your own thing orjoin something like Khan Academy -- there are a million places you could putyour talent that would make the world a better place.

replyyarapavan 1 day ago | link

So, there is a platform rule now -

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product willalways be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

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vogonj 15 hours ago | link

if you consider SMTP+IMAP/POP3 to be APIs, then this is a simple corollary to Zawinski's Law.the reduction is left as an exercise to the reader.

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nextparadigms 18 hours ago | link

This post reminds of me of why I couldn't believe Google would launch Honeycomb with almost noapps optimized for it, when Microsoft managed to have 2000 apps at the launch of WP7.

Also, why they didn't try to bring the content owners on board for Google TV, and why I think theywill be missing a huge opportunity to turn Google TV into a "console platform" . But I feared theywon't "get" this, and this post is setting my expectations even lower for that.

I knew Google didn't have much experience with an OS, compared to Microsoft or Apple, and I thinkthey are learning, but they need to learn much faster, and they really need to put some "designthinking" into everything they do, from the ground up. They are starting to learn about gooddesign/polish on the surface, but it really needs to happen at the core of the product from day one.

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koko775 4 hours ago | link

So this is somewhat related, somewhat off topic from the subject at hand, but... ----

As for bringing content owners on board - as far as I can tell, they did. Their developer supportwas also very responsive. A+ on forming a dialogue with developers.

Their problem IMO is that they don't appear to feel it in their bones how important productdifferentiation is. Maybe they get it, but I don't think it's sunk in.

Allow me to elaborate. What's the difference between an embedded device, a phone, a mini-tablet, a tablet, and GoogleTV? Well...

* Embedded devices might have a pre-2.x Android that never got updated. But that's okay,nobody develops apps for them anyways.

* Phones probably have 2.1, maybe 2.2.

* A mini-tablet could be 2.1 or 2.2, and has the mobile device UI.

* A tablet might have 3.0 or 3.1 on it.

* GoogleTV has 3.0 on it, but its market app might filter like it's 3.1. How do you differentiatethis in code? Version specifiers, specifying notouch (which will break if googletv ever supportsany kind of touchscreen, on a large screen size (which is smaller than a tablet, which has aextra large screen), etc.

Want to develop for iOS? Great. Would you like iPhone or iPad? Or both? Need to make sure itworks on 99.9% of the devices that can download it? No problem. And hopefully, sometime inthe future, maybe Apple will see fit to enable the AppleTV for developers.

Circling back to address your statements, if Google's aim, or one of them, is to make GoogleTVinto a gaming platform, I don't have much confidence in Google's ability to deliver on that



goal, because GoogleTV is little more than a revision of Android plus some optional APIs, andAndroid is architected as a multi-device platform. It's not a single device with multiplerevisions, as is the case with the iPhone 3G/3GS/4/4S sequence, or even the Nintendo DSand its subsequent revisions. There are reasons that Android isn't as compelling a gameplatform as iOS is, and that is a big one.

With respect to building a multimedia application platform, GoogleTV has potential if for noother reason than it's one of the few set-top boxes with an app store, period, and aprogramming interface that isn't thoroughly obtuse, but the GTV's design and usability arevery weak, almost pre-alpha, even, as if it were scarcely more than a straight-up port ofAndroid's touch-optimized interface with an inadequate amount of polish. It's nothing youraverage TV-watching user is going to grok, if the keyboard+mouse remote didn't clue you in.

Really, what it comes down to is that, even for hardware, Google just doesn't seem to want torelease something "perfect". They just want "shippable" -- or I daresay "just barely shippable"- if you can call it that. Even if they have critical bugs, so long as developers can work aroundthem, even if they haven't nailed down the UI, and make a sweeping change right beforepublic release, that's still "good enough". And "good enough" is the enemy of "great".

Until Google puts design thinking into their products from the ground up, as you put it, theyaren't going to be able to lead the marketplace.

/rant

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redwood 15 hours ago | link

The unmentioned take-away here is not simply the focus on Platforms, but the reminder that'Circles' are a weak feature to build a social network on. Why? because user's had already buildorganic circles across multiple social spaces (e.g. professional-only on Linkedin, perhaps family orcollege-safe on Facebook, close social on gmail, etc).

What's the advantage to multiple platforms for multiple circles? you don't accidentally post yourinternal company rant to the whole world. You don't post pictures of red cups and beer bongs onLinkedin and you don't talk about work on Facebook. This is how users were operating before G+launched, and is precisely why users aren't diving in.

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nathanb 15 hours ago | link

If Amazon understand APIs and platforms so well, why doesn't Amazon Cloud Drive have an API?

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aangjie 19 hours ago | link

Hmm.. Great level of detail in steve yegge's post for a rant....Infact one of my pain points withgoogle+ is not being able aggregate(#tags) and publish feeds from my blog. slightly OT: does anyoneelse think there seems to be a trend of ranting recently, i mean Ryan Dahl,ted dziuba, and nowsteve yegge??

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DanBC 22 minutes ago | link

Have a browse through alt.sysadmin.recovery

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nl 3 hours ago | link

You obviously weren't around when the Bile Blog was active. Eg:http://www.bileblog.org/2006/12/open-sores-scams/

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bnr 18 hours ago | link

It is my understanding that Yegge basically invented ranting.

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anupj 14 hours ago | link



I think he made it "mainstream" :)

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aangjie 4 hours ago | link

Well, i haven't been following him long enough to comment on that. But i doknow i prefer his rant compared to the other two. It seems to have morefacts/details than the others.

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For those that want to read the post: http://steverant.pen.io/

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gms 9 hours ago | link

I find it hard to believe that any significant number of people use things made using FacebookPlatform. Vast majority of people simply use the product itself.

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chwahoo 5 hours ago | link

Spotify, MOG, Pandora, Farmville, are all popular users of the platform.

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abbott 1 day ago | link

which came first, the product or the platform? I remember when twitter switched over their publicsite and services to run on their API. Instagram just built theirs earlier this year. If the platform hasan outage, so does the product. It's tough to justify a platform until you have traction, andunfortunately the industry track record reflects this.

Excellent insights in Steve's post.

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mun2mun 12 hours ago | link

Sorry for commenting same comment again. But check the post posted here 3 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882

At that time everyone was praising about bezos, amazons culture.What circumstances changed theviews about amazon? Honest question.

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bozho 1 day ago | link

I have one odd guess about why Google can get a decent "platform". They hire "hackers". Theirrecruitment process involves 99% computer science and almost none software engineering. So thepeople there, being amazing at the most complex computing tasks, just aren't seeing the "bigpicture".

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objclxt 22 hours ago | link

I notice that he doesn't think much of Amazon's hiring practices, but doesn't really addressthe fact that Google's aren't really that great either. When it works, it works, but the hiringcommittee system they use has some failure glaring flaws as well.

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nextparadigms 18 hours ago | link

Wave may have been a great platform, and it's probably why many still want to continue it to thisday, but it was a terrible product UI wise, and I think that's the biggest reason it failed.

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codejoust 18 hours ago | link

Response: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/bwJ7kAEL...



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rythie 1 day ago | link

Has someone still got it open in tab to repost here? since it seems to have been removed.

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Try this: http://steverant.pen.io/

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tRAS 22 hours ago | link

I just clicked on edit page, and gave 'steverant' as the password. Guess, whathappened next. :P

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rythie 23 hours ago | link

thanks

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tmsh 17 hours ago | link

google search: 'malcolm gladwell third'.

Sort of relevant. Different mindsets.

I don't completely buy the argument (the marginal utility of learning from the first and seconditeration isn't always as meaningful as you might think) -- but I partly buy the argument. And it'ssort of relevant here. I.e., it's hard to be inventive and an integrator. Though once you're aware ofthe problem it might not be that hard.

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ramkalari 22 hours ago | link

It would be interesting to take Salesforce also as a case study. Didn't they move from a product to aplatform?

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danmaz74 16 hours ago | link

The first thing that this post, and the comments, make me think is just how difficult it is to run a bigcompany.

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yetanotherkosta 23 hours ago | link

Here's another mirror of that post

https://plus.google.com/117935797319364093334/posts/95Laytmo...

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yonasb 14 hours ago | link

The fact that he didn't mean to post this is proof enough that G+ sucks. And he's spot on abouteverything he said. Google doesn't get platforms at all. Look what happened to Blogger, arguablytheir most successful platform (which they didn't even build).

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aab1d 23 hours ago | link

The article is no more available. I read it and then sent it to a few friends and now its the links dead.

That was the best and most truthful article I read in a long long time.

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djhworld 21 hours ago | link

Very insightful and interesting read, a good way to spend a few minutes during my lunch break!



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TheTarquin 13 hours ago | link

"...a few minutes..."

You obviously read a hell of a lot faster than I do.

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piglet99 13 hours ago | link

Google's "stubby" technology hasn't been talked of publicly before has it ?????

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coob 21 hours ago | link

He's taken it down, here's the original text:

http://pastebin.com/wGfKuMAJ

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djohnsonm 20 hours ago | link

Looks like google deleted this article...

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badclient 17 hours ago | link

No platform can save Google+ from dieing. Steve himself seems to hint at that by saying a Platformis not enough.

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catch23 1 day ago | link

Wow, looks like he got slapped by some Google VP or something -- the post ceases to exist.

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Zadoc 12 hours ago | link

Well, I don't know if it's a pathetic after thought (Okrut, anyone?). But it's definitely a "me too" kindof a product. One that still needs to appeal to a wider base.

POLL: Is Google+ little more than a pathetic afterthought? Vote:http://www.wepolls.com/p/3740179

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kalusn 22 hours ago | link

I'm pretty sure this got upvoted because people thought Steve = Steve Jobs. Congratulations!

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praptak 22 hours ago | link

Given that:

1. Steve Yegge has enough street cred of his own.

2. The article was an insightful and informative piece giving a rare opportunity to peek at theinner workings of two important tech companies.

I conclude that your assertion is most probably wrong.

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Isn't this the second highly public data point (that I know of) of him slashing and burning G+ andGoogle and then backtracking and saying how Google is the best place to work for (the previous one:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818). That one, he claimed, was a misunderstanding,this one is a late night permissions error. I am sorry but for someone of his caliber these sound likemade up excuses.

I think he sees the problems, goes off the deep end, then either sobers up or is muzzled by Google's



PR machine. Or Google may be thinking any publicity is good publicity.

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cbs 18 hours ago | link

>Isn't this the second highly public data point (that I know of) of him slashing and burningG+ and Google and then backtracking and saying how Google is the best place to work for

No its not, because thats not what happened this time. He is pretty clear that he likes googleand but sees some flaws. Did you even read the post? Hes not backtracking, he was justbeing critical about something to an audience he thought would be able to understand him. Icould trash aspects of the product I work on to my coworkers too, that doesn't mean I don'tthink that it isn't overall good.

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I read the post a second time much more carefully and it seems clear now that he didtarget an internal Google audience from the tone, i.e. it was a genuine mistake. So Itake my previous comment back.

As for your comment about thrashing a product but loving the workspace: Yegge'scriticisms run deep, they are not just about a stupid feature in a product; rather theyare about the company's DNA.

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andrewljohnson 13 hours ago | link

This document offers no solutions at all, it's hard to follow, and it was played in the wrong forum.

1) No solutions - What exactly should Google do? What string of thought should we start with tomake any sort of improvements?

2) Hard to follow - Yegge shocks you by seeming like he's insulting Amazon, he tells you someanecdotes to give himself creedence, and he starts to get to his point about accessibility andplatformification a million paragraphs in.

3) Wrong forum - Why is this on the public internet? If it wasn't, Yegge wouldn't need to spend thefirst half of the article establishing his credibility. If he would talk to his peers, then they coulddiscuss the meaty technical and strategic issues without meandering around in a nostalgic haze forthousands of words.

Yegge is not Bill Gates, and this is no Internet Tide Wave memo. It would be an embarrassment forGoogle to have this out there, if it weren't instead just an embarrassment to the author. It soundslike Yegge is more interested in stirring the pot and publishing unrefined thoughts than working onactual solutions.

Rant indeed. Get some sleep bro.

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