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Comment by hughesjj | Hacker News Reader

Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.

There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.

Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.

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What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.

MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.

AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.

It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.

It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right.

That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.

I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.

I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?

Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time.

SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place

Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake

Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time

Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.

Amazon the shopping website is useful and reliable at least.

They can't even sort by price.

Yeah but they can ship me my Nespresso pods and scrub brush drill bit attachments and vitamin b complex by 4am the next day.

That may or may not be counterfeit.

Ingesting vitamins from Amazon is certainly a choice. One I would not make in 2024.

Yeah, I email Pure Encapsulations the lot code and they verify its authenticity.

Isn't that a lot of work and a negation of the purpose of fast shipping?

It’s an email and takes me about 10 seconds to send. So not really no.

The shopping site is the worst mainstream shopping site. Find stuff is hell. It’s missing criteria, finding the shipping time / cost when comparing products is painful.

Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.

>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.

What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?

It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).

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