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Comment by maratd | Hacker News Reader

> Is there some significant advantage to identifying the page with non-human readable identifiers in the query string that I'm not aware of?

Sure. When your organization uses a custom CMS and creating pretty URLs requires approval from multiple departments and takes days (or weeks) and you want to throw up a page all quick-like.

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Not sure why you would need approval for a pretty URL and wouldn't need approval for the design and content in general. Couldn't those be lumped together for approval at the same time? It just seems subpar for a company of Amazon's size, especially when most CMS platforms have support for pretty urls.

Not sure that the design for this page went through any sort of approval process though :)

At a big company, you're getting multiple approvals from multiple people in different areas of the company. If it was as simple as "Get the approval from the President" that'd be one thing, but there's most like a team in charge of just URLs and another team designing the app who would need to go to the URL team for approvals. Another team will most likely be the gatekeeper for whether it goes to production or not, and there's probably at least a half dozen other infrastructure teams I haven't mentioned also involved in the process. I haven't worked for Amazon, but I've worked for another large company, so I know what it's like.

Most of the other teams involved that I've seen at places are usually other development teams who are consulted not because they have any specific reason but because as you go up the chain they want to make sure that nobody is already planning to use that same name/pretty url for something to avoid conflicts where one team all the sudden has two days notice to change their branding/url.

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