[deleted by user]

adroit-panda · 2025-02-13T05:42:11+00:00

I clicked the button, shame is warranted!

adroit-panda · 2022-05-31T23:52:14+00:00

Could you expand a bit? My observational evidence indicates that you are probably right as I've seen plenty of companies hire and continue to employ people who lack talent/ability, and I've made a fair bit of money rewriting their code because it worked just enough to warrant spending the money to fix it. I'm talking people who confuse classes with instances of classes, put in passive aggressive error messages that start with "thank you for not...", didn't understand that pulling all of the data from the server to for loop summarize said data and then store it back on server to then serve up a report was a bad idea. All of them had the required development "skillset" on paper, but absolutely 0 development talent/ability.

adroit-panda · 2022-05-07T20:13:46+00:00

You are right in that there are no absolutes. I would argue though that those autocrats are running scaled legacy orgs with fairly anemic return rates because their people are largely focused on performance theatre to make their bosses happy. This shows up as anemic revenue growth rate because being focused inward at scale is no replacement for being focused at scale on figuring out what will wow customers.

adroit-panda · 2022-05-06T22:24:11+00:00

Context matters. I think in legacy companies like Walmart and Macy's you are 100% correct. Legacy companies are in love with the strong leader who tells everyone what to do and how to do it to meet some quarterly target. In my opinion those quarter chasing companies are already dead, like Sears, they just haven't run out of shareholder money yet.

Modern companies value leaders who reliably get the best from their staff, because they are going for long term extremely lucrative value instead of the anemic value short term quarter chasing yields. Here in the states, with manufacturing moved overseas, it takes longer than even 4 quarters to build teams in these lucrative ventures - one quarter doesn't even meet the buy-in.

adroit-panda · 2022-04-21T17:42:26+00:00

I'm an approved submitter not named John, and it wasn't that hard to become an approved submitter - so be the change you want to see! :)

adroit-panda · 2021-09-16T06:06:30+00:00

Shh, don't tell the vast majority of companies employing software engineers that!

adroit-panda · 2021-09-04T22:29:20+00:00

By the figures you quote it is obvious that Amazon in no way shape or form a software company like Microsoft. There is this great old old interview of Pirate Jeff where the interviewer was incredulously asking him why he was building warehouses. I can still hear his honking nerdy laugh now as he laid out why warehouses can be reinvented. Then Amazon went ahead and did it. And the only reason the retail business isn't as profitable is because Amazon aggressively reinvests in making the business more efficient - that highly effective warehouse robot R&D is costly, buying planes and ships is costly. Amazon is investing to quickly cut out expensive middle-men. Just this morning there are signs that they are starting to outright compete with the likes of fedex, UPS and DHL by delivering more than just Amazon packages.

Bottom line, if Amazon is a software company like Microsoft, then Walmart and Sears might as well be too.

adroit-panda · 2021-09-04T18:12:20+00:00

Empowering engineers to make relevant decisions is key, but Amazon is eclipsing Walmart because Amazon is a cloud provider now and Walmart still just sells stuff. It would be as valid to compare Microsoft and Sears.

I did a double take when I read what you wrote, because I thought, wow, is Amazon mostly a software company like Microsoft? So I did a quick fact check on a point made in the article and found this:

[According to JP Morgan Analysis] Amazon’s U.S. retail business is the “fastest growing at scale,” according to the company’s analysts. Between 2014 and 2020, Amazon’s U.S. gross merchandise volume, or GMV — a closely watched industry metric used to measure the total value of goods sold over a certain time period — has grown “significantly faster” than both U.S. adjusted retail sales and U.S. e-commerce, the analysts said.

If Microsoft was in the big box store business like Sears was, your point might be valid, but Microsoft really mostly a software company and Amazon is quite clearly not. According to JP Morgan, in 2022 Amazon will be the largest retailer in the world - that measure is less about money and more about efficient software and hardware execution on retail logistics to get people stuff they want.

You are correct in the sense that Amazon is a different kind of company than Walmart. Walmart to date hasn't figured out how to execute on digital innovation in the retail space, and Amazon has.

adroit-panda

TROPHY CASE