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Posted by doener 3 hours ago

'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company's AI on Slack(www.404media.co)
143 points | 68 commentspage 2
kotaKat 3 hours ago|
Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.
Centigonal 3 hours ago||
IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.
nijave 26 minutes ago|||
Imo a lot of AWS products are garbage. Their key competency is making technical products for technical users from scratch given concrete requirements

All the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad

KyleTheDev 3 hours ago||||
Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.
dieselgate 2 hours ago||
Dang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email
hbn 2 hours ago||||
I'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone.
reducesuffering 3 hours ago||||
Amazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS.
cyberax 3 hours ago||||
Amazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.
gedy 2 hours ago||||
Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful
antonvs 56 minutes ago|||
> I know there are good product people inside Amazon

For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?

watermelon0 44 minutes ago|||
Unless something has changed recently, Slack uses AWS Chime SDK for audio/video, so at least the core technology is great.
pRusya 1 hour ago|||
The Chime team is still busy. They released a new version just two weeks ago!
cmiles8 2 hours ago||
When AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy.
Insanity 3 hours ago||
Hardly newsworthy, everything is mocked on the internal slack lol.
dlev_pika 3 hours ago|
Make it anonymous. Now that would be newsworthy.
Nuzzerino 3 hours ago||
Anonymous is the hero we need here for sure
economistbob 2 hours ago||
Any text forums these days has the grokenspiels played by sloppenheimers. It feels like a literature cross between Punk'd and Crank Yankers but stars clanker wankers rather than TV and movie celebrities.
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago||
Another one of these 404 Media bait posts, okay, we got it, there's internal staff memes.

Related:

Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311

bebeidjdkrjrjr 3 hours ago||
[flagged]
tcp_handshaker 3 hours ago||
You cant deliver and have quality engineering teams, while you spent the last 15 years treating your employees under a frugal way, and being the biggest H1B IT employer in the US.
zuzululu 2 hours ago|
Maybe those people need to part ways with the company and let professionals replace them instead
bobim 2 hours ago||
If you've been 20 years in and built the infrastructure you might disagree with new management and have a very clear view on the harm new policies are making. Professionals might be the ones that have skin in the game.
zuzululu 1 hour ago||
You don't actually have skin in the game as part of the cost center. Again, the thing to do if you are not happy with the decision making or management is to leave and let another mature professional replace you instead of adding to the complaining and degrading morale of the overall company.

A professional recognizes the above and someone just there to pay the bills isn't.

supjeff 2 hours ago||
maybe the managers should be replaced