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Where does engineering rep come from? Here's a Google engineer slagging on Amazon engineering, which they say mediocre.
I don't think this is an unusual opinion, I've heard this from people both inside and outside of Google. Google has the best engineering, Amazon is mediocre.
I don't think this is an unusual opinion, I've heard this from people both inside and outside of Google. Google has the best engineering, Amazon is mediocre.
When I worked on cloud at MS, it was the same -- although AWS was clearly in the lead, a major concern was that Google's superior engineering would allow them to crush AWS and Azure; "preparing for a knife fight with Amazon, but Google is going to bring a gun to this knife fight"
But when I looked at execution speed on actual projects (via backchannel communications), AWS was smoking both us and Google. In one case, I heard that they got the idea for a project from our product announcement and they still shipped before we did.
They weren't moving fast and breaking things -- when I looked at 3rd party measured uptime, AWS was clearly #1 and we were going back and forth with Google for #2.
This understates AWS's edge since they had fewer global outages and less flakiness that didn't count as downtime.
This understates AWS's edge since they had fewer global outages and less flakiness that didn't count as downtime.
The more I looked into this, the more impressed I was with Amazon engineering. But AFAICT this never translated into any kind of reputational change.
I don't think this is unique to Amazon either. When I compare general reputation to what I can observe, they seem uncorrelated.
I don't think this is unique to Amazon either. When I compare general reputation to what I can observe, they seem uncorrelated.
BTW, I don't mean this thread as an attack on MS or Google.
It's more that if I could take a sabbatical from my job and intern somewhere to learn from them, Amazon would be at the top of my list and I don't think many others would put any company in my top 3 in their top 50.
It's more that if I could take a sabbatical from my job and intern somewhere to learn from them, Amazon would be at the top of my list and I don't think many others would put any company in my top 3 in their top 50.
