Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story - Softcover

S., Kalpanik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 145153082X ISBN 13: 9781451530827

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Kalpanik S. is an immigrant technologist. He came to the USA on a fellowship from the University of California in late eighties to study and do research in Computer Science.

After completing his Graduate studies, Kalpanik worked at both large technology companies and small start-ups in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Nashville and Southern California. He has been writing a journal about his "journey'" through the US, and he finally decided to get it published.

Kalpanik (pronounced as Kaalp-Nik) means "imaginary" in Hindi. Author decided to use a pen name to allow him to separate his literary identity from his professional identity.

Kalpanik is also a great observer, not only he is able to point to the uniqueness, oddity and eccentricity of places, people and culture, he cleverly stretches it for a comic effect, making us crack up page after page.

However, even though his writing has great splashes of humor, it is also very thoughtful. Also, many of the plots, incidents and characters have a layer of a second meaning, delighting his readers when they figure out the cleverly hidden message, or the unexpected punchline, making his books cater to the needs of both the readers who are looking for something light and refreshing, and those who want something more sophisticated.

Many of the photos in this book were taken by Colin Zheng, another foreign technology immigrant.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 145153082X
• ISBN 13: 9781451530827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 182