evanjacobs's comments

Despite controlling about 40% of US online retail, Amazon only has about an 8% share of total US retail. There’s still plenty of room to grow here.

https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...

The mission of S3 Insights is to help customers understand what data they have and how their data is being used in order to recommend actions they can take on their data. As an engineer on the AWS S3 Insights team, you will write software to efficiently and accurately aggregate every event in S3, summarize and digest that data, and generate key insights for customers.

Here are a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2071571/software-development...

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2155848/senior-software-dev-...

NB: The positions above are for engineers with industry experience. If you're a recent college graduate, please go instead to Student Programs at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-full-time

It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.

Alexa for Everyone is focused on making Alexa an indispensable part of the lives of people with disabilities, older customers, and family caregivers. We are a small team of engineers and product managers and we have an ambitious road map for the year.

We are looking for engineers who love to invent new experiences on behalf of customers and are willing to dive into any layer of the tech stack in order to deliver those experiences on a large scale.

Please take a look at two of our open positions listed below or reach out to me (I'm the Hiring Manager) directly at [email protected]

Current open positions:

Sr. Software Development Engineer: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/696864/senior-software-devel...

Software Development Engineer: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/839068/software-development-...

So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.

Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.

We're focused on making Alexa the UI for the home and we're looking for engineers who want to help us in this mission. This is a unique opportunity to be an early member of a team whose work will have a big impact on customers. In order to achieve this mission, you'll get to build a wide variety of applications and services using a range of technologies.

Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/478440

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/479984

P.S. If you're a recent college graduate, you can apply for those positions at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-full-time

P.P.S. If you're looking for a summer internship, those positions are available at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-internship

We're focused on making Alexa the UI for the home and we're looking for engineers who want to help us in this mission. This is a unique opportunity to be an early member of a team whose work will have a big impact on customers. In order to achieve this mission, you'll get to build a wide variety of applications and services using a range of technologies.

Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/478440

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/479984

One example is an app that I built that lets authors sign ebooks (Authorgraph: http://www.authorgraph.com). This idea was a result of doing more and more reading on my Kindle but missing the experience of meeting authors and having them sign my books.

From the description on the author's website:

"Chicago, 1954. When his father goes missing, twenty-two-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Samuel Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both the mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours."

http://www.bymattruff.com/my-novels/lovecraft-country/

During a game one night, one of the non-starting pitchers was bored in the dugout and started doodling on the baseballs that would be periodically brought out to the umpire (to replace balls that are hit out of play or that are scuffed on the dirt). He happened to know that it was the home plate umpire's birthday that day and so on one ball he wrote "Happy Birthday Dave" (or whatever the umpire's name was). At one point, that ball was brought out to the umpire by the bat boy along with a few other balls and was put into play by the umpire who didn't notice the inscription.

The batter happened to hit that ball foul into the stands where it was caught by a guy named Dave who was also celebrating his birthday that day.

http://downtownbellevue.com/2007/09/27/amazon-fresh-online-g...

More about her story at: http://espn.go.com/espnw/blogs/training/article/6177784/kath...

Here were the most frustrating aspects of interviewing for me:

1. Bar raisers don't ask questions that they themselves don't know the answer to. I believe this is what Roseman is referring to (as a desirable?!? attribute) when he says "One of the things that really pisses me off is people asking questions that they don’t even have a good handle on themselves". What happens in practice is that you miss hiring people who may not be able to answer a question to which every interviewer already knows the answer but whom might be uniquely qualified in some other area.

2. Interviewers still ask candidates to code answers to theoretical questions on the whiteboard. There is no room in the Amazon interview process to "try out" a candidate for a week or two in a real world setting to see how they perform.

3. Amazon considers all SDEs to be fungible but internal politics determines which group gets to interview a new candidate. Have an advanced degree and strong interest in machine learning? Too bad, US Retail needs someone to work on front-end development and they'll ask you lots of questions about javascript.

4. This isn't really part of the Amazon interview process but Amazon's job descriptions are (for the most part) written so generically and absent of personality that I think they miss out on lots of great candidates for whom startups simply seem more fun & interesting.

NY Times Editorial Board 6/7/2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-d...