Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story

Kalpanik S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 145153082X ISBN 13: 9781451530827

Publisher: Createspace, 2010

On Dec. 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide on Amazon, which is a record-breaking 110 items per second. How large a machine do you need to process and ship this kind of volume? How efficiently do you need operate it? And what kind of people do you need to keep it going?

The author, a former Technologist from Amazon.com writing under a pen name, gives us a vivid, sometime brutal inside scoop on Amazon.com's giant machinery, describing its cold and calculating culture in detail.

The story begins in Silicon Valley where we go through author's experiences in the fast moving world of a Hi-Tech start up. Soon thereafter, the author's start-up is acquired and he finds himself looking for a job.

He finds one in Seattle, a medley of lush green hills surrounded by snow capped mountains and sparking blue waters. Amazon.com--an Internet company based in Seattle which has taken the stock markets by storm, and has been transforming itself from an online retailer to an eCommerce platform, led by a CEO who is not afraid to act goofy.

It begins as a story of a technologist leaving behind his beloved Silicon Valley for Seattle. It unfolds into a moving story capturing Seattle's beauty, its interesting people and culture; and the inside scoop on the dot-com world - both the excitement and joy of innovation, and also the dark side of a culture driven by metrics, including "Cruelty curve", a quota for letting go of a certain number of people every year, a gene pool improving methodology by putting the weakest 10% on a chopping block.