Tell that to Twitch and Ring employees. The consolidation of the tech industry is pretty apparent and I would put a lot of money on Amazon being one of the "final four" of the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
I'll accept the logistics management part of Prime and AWS as obviously major achievements, but Alexa, Prime Video and Go?
Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier, and every so often tells a child exactly how to electrocute themselves.
Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience.
And having moved to Seattle recently, I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.
You are approaching all of these from the perspective of an engineer and not recognizing that ordinary people don't see products and systems the way you do (a mistake I also often make).
> Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier
For the average person who isn't super-bothered about privacy, the voice-activated functionality is genuinely novel and delightful.
> Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience
"2nd best to Netflix" is no slouch at all.
> I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.
So - an intentionally-small-selection store has a small selection, your personal preferences don't line up with the (you must admit, extremely friction-free) checkout system, and you worried about a bug that (from the fact that you phrased it that way) didn't actually happen? Sounds like it's working extremely well for how it's designed!
(Disclaimer - I'm an Amazon employee, though I don't work on any of the discussed products, and frankly am pretty critical of them all both internally and externally too. But to claim that they're not successes _at the criteria that they are aiming for_ is mistaken)
The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people. Also, I can see how my friends who use alexa (and google for that matter) have adapted their vocal cadences and vocab to interact with the device. And at the end of the day it is a way for people to play music, get news/weather reports, and order more goods. All things that are already very easy on smartphones/web browsers.
As for Go, I have never seen a corner shop, either in the US or in Europe, with such a tiny density of goods. It is designed to look like a Safeway or a Kroger but then is "intentionally" a small store. It's fine if this is still in the trial stage but that is what it felt like, instead of feeling like an actual shopping experience I would use day to day. Also, there was no one else in the store at all, during each of the 3 times I went, so I am still going to wonder what the success rate will be when tracking lots of people constantly picking up and putting down items.
And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said.
> The whole "average person doesn't care about privacy" while generally true, is in my opinion, a cop out that allows us software developers to hand wave away the ways we monetize people.
Right, yep, I absolutely whole-heartedly 100% agree - hence why I am critical of this technology at every reasonable juncture. I was presenting this as a counter-argument to the argument I mistakenly thought you were making (that voice control is not a successful product because it involves privacy-invasion), not as a justification of the technology itself.
> And sorry for the confusion, I'm not saying they aren't successes. I'm just saying that they are not world wide game changers like Prime and AWS as the original poster said.
Ah, fair. I'll gladly agree to that! Alexa is not meaningfully distinguished from Google Home or Siri, so it can't really be said to be a game-changer; ditto for Prime Video and Netflix/D+, etc; and I do agree with you that Prime Go is, at best, a marginal progression on the current state of affairs (I do think that "not needing to employ checkout people" is probably massively impactful from a business-process perspective, but from a customers' perspective, not really much different from a self-checkout)
Thank you for a respectful and illuminating exchange - this is why HN remains the only social site that I feel good about using :D
Prime video was fantastic, but it’s starting to revert to traditional television network tactics.
Additional paid channel packages, commercials in the middle of paid programming, advertisements at the beginning of non-paid programming, new seasons being released in a weekly pattern instead of all at once.
This seems like pretty hand-wavy thinking. Decision making can be thought of as a directed graph, where you have various situations as nodes and actions as edges.
That does indeed mirror how games work, however for all of our systems we do not perfectly know the actual "true" state of the graph. Even the oldest, simplest, most well understood systems are not understood perfectly. The fog of war is ever present.
To present systems management without the "intricacies of computers" you either have to not care where the actions lead you, or have a system that is perfectly understood. And if the latter is the case, then there is literally 0 value in a human pressing the buttons.
> To present systems management without the "intricacies of computers" you either have to not care where the actions lead you, or have a system that is perfectly understood.
This is a false dichotomy—why would there be no middle ground? It's in that middle ground that all useful abstractions reside, and many of them are effectively lossless compressions of some "computational intricacies," which makes it possible to non-misleadingly interact through some simplified interface.
This isn't to say that forming such a simplified interface is impossible to get wrong, but to say the results will necessarily be poor is overly dismissive.
This happened to everything it could at least 10 years ago. It turns out that if you want software that works (at all), you need to pay people well, regardless of where they are in the world. Stop reenforcing this notion that leads to massive overwork and burnout in the US (+ Canada). Germany, the UK, Sweden, etc all have much, much better working conditions for software devs and their jobs aren't going away
> I hear that many of the European countries have lower dev salaries than the US. So maybe better conditions, but possibly lower pay.
While arguably true, it's almost definitely not better conditions to blame. A more likely source is the massive and relatively homogenous US market, a culture open to immigration, and the huge reserves of capital sloshing about the country.
Yeah, I'm not saying they are related. Just saying it can be a trade-off between higher pay and fewer hours and there are many variables to consider when comparing internationally.
Like, if we take taxes as a percentage of GDP as a figure, the US scores pretty well at about 27%. But Australia is at 28%, Canada at 32%, and even the UK at 33%. The differences aren't massive here. He'll, Ireland comes in at 23%.
This is not my experience. Overseas devs have only gotten better and more tightly aligned with the west in the past 10 years. The idea of throwing your work over then fence to the cheapest jurisidiction may have died but there are significant cost savings in going overseas, especially as westerners get more expensive and remote work grows
As with all things, it's about trade-offs. As much as I dislike this company for its policies towards time off and butts-in-seats[0], I am not on-call and am never obligated to answer my phone outside of work, no one bats an eye at me taking a few hours to make an appointment every now and then, I don't hate my manager or coworkers, and generally little is expected of me which suits me fine because I haven't found IT work fulfilling for at least 5 years.
[0] Which is directly responsible for infecting my household with COVID. Literally everyone in the company has had it.
He was literally talking about how it was his choice to stay, and you're calling him a slave. Over only getting half a day off on Christmas Eve, which is not even a holiday. I honestly cannot tell what is sarcasm anymore.
Christmas eve is usually a work day for the vast majority of the world, even the out-of-touch white collar minority. We benefit from the fact that (a) the work is easy, (b) not much of it gets done and (c) you go home 1/2 way through the day. You sound even more out of touch than the rest of us if you think this is "barbaric".
Is this unusual? A quick google search shows Trump issued an executive order just last year to give the day off to federal employees, but Wikipedia doesn't list it as a federal holiday.
