Comments on: Why is Amazon hiring like a drunken sailor?

By: darylcheshire

darylcheshire — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:40:51 +0000

perhaps the publicity of sacking thousands when things go pear-shaped is cheaper than advertising.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:14:15 +0000

Here is the current list of jobs on the AWS team:

http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/jobs/all_aws_jobs_list.html

By: Jubal

Jubal — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:32:17 +0000

Cloud is hot right now, we’re hiring like crazy in Windows Azure too. http://bit.ly/azure_jobs.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:27:07 +0000

Amazon doesn’t seem to be as healthy as everything might perceive them to be. I do though believe that the cloud industry will grow substantially in the following years, especially SaaS. Anyways, great post, keep them coming!

By: Jonatha

Jonatha — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:20:15 +0000

I didn’t know drunken sailors hired a lot of staff.

Or are metaphors yet another entry into the long list of things that gigaom are clueless about?

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:59:46 +0000

Oh man, Amazon will chew you up and spit you out. I wouldn’t go back there at gun point.

By: Barb Darrow

Barb Darrow — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:29:32 +0000

hi randy. I’ve been talking to quite a few people — AWS users — who really think that all amazon wants to do is sell more thin-margin storage. They don’t buy the enterprise push at all. I know many don’t agree, but there it is.

By: Barb Darrow

Barb Darrow — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:28:23 +0000

my initial thought was to go with “spending” but this is all about hiring…mixed metaphor i guess. My bad.

By: J. Andrew Rogers

J. Andrew Rogers — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:46:27 +0000

“hiring like a drunken sailor”? Maybe at a brothel. Drunken sailors are known for many characteristics but hiring is not one of them.

By: randy

randy — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:29:03 +0000

“There is a healthy debate about whether Amazon [...] really wants to enter the world of higher-margin enterprise software and services.”

Really?

Overall revenue for Amazon “was up 34 percent to $17.4 billion. Electronics and general merchandise was up 48 percent, media sales rose 15 percent and its “other” category — which includes its Amazon Web Services — was up 58 percent.” (reuters)

Not sure that Amazon is taking a big risk here, by offering expensive support for AWS, so I’m not sure where this “healthy debate” is taking place (references??).

Building AWS-based infrastructure can be convoluted; sometimes a wizard with all the answers is just what an enterprise needs. If the complexity of AWS is its biggest weakness (though it’s really not that complicated at all once you understand the beauty of it), this clearly self-sustaining service program (with a price like that, it’s got to be!) can only help bolster revenues for AWS going forward.