
Dave Clark, The Man Who Built Amazon’s Delivery Machine - Bostonian
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-17/amazon-holiday-shopping-the-man-who-makes-it-happen
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throwaway773064
As someone who has worked in that man's organization for many years: he's an
idiot who believes himself a genius.

> “He knows every nook and cranny of the company.”

He'll show up at warehouses in the middle of peak (busy, holiday season) and
demand changes to operational configurations that to against the standards set
out by subject matter experts. Because Dave knows better. And Dave gets what
he wants. As soon as he walks out the door, everyone has to put everything
back the way it should be before the site has a high severity incident.

> habit of lurking in the shadows of Amazon warehouses and scoping out
> slackers he could fire

If the article didn't make it clear, he's a sociopath. Worse, he promotes
other sociopaths to higher levels of management.

> The Man Who Built Amazon’s Delivery Machine

His claim to fame really is that he was in the right place at the right time.
Dave Clark built Amazon delivery? No, Dave Clark was at the helm of operations
when Amazon realized that if the company didn't build a delivery network asap,
they'd be in trouble in a few years when demand outstripped (cheap) supply. If
Dave were smart, that's something he'd have figured out years earlier.

~~~
crmrc114
Well you just summed up my Amazon experience in a nutshell.

The only people who stay in Amazon management are sociopaths, megalomaniacs
and the rare case of those who need the insurance. My pals in AWS, Zappos or
Twitch all loved their jobs. Fulfillment is a special kind of hell.

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anarbadalov
Jesus, i would not want this guy's job, nor would i want to work for him.

"His colleagues describe a demanding manager who is impossible to bluff.
During the holidays, Clark’s team meets daily to review metrics about Amazon
facilities around the world. Clark can zero in on any signs of trouble since
he’s been scanning the same figures for 20 years. A key metric is the
estimated delivery time shoppers see when they view a product on Amazon, which
is broken down by geography. If the number is moving in the wrong direction,
Clark demands an explanation and a solution. The culture is far from pleasant,
but current and former insiders marvel at its effectiveness."

~~~
ismitley
It depends on how much you value money, I guess. Everyone that reports
directly to Dave is probably going to be a VP making 800k/year-several
million.

~~~
codeisawesome
What are the mechanisms in corporations that determine these figures? Always
been super duper curious how the salary of a VP is "set"...

~~~
hogFeast
It is usually some combination of consultants using bogus logic, and other
executives trying to bump their own pay by hiring very expensive colleagues.

I have never been convinced it is worth paying these kind of numbers. I have
looked at all kinds of businesses, I have looked at businesses where
productivity is power-law distributed (i.e. one good employee can be worth
10,000+ bad ones) and it never adds up...again, even if you look at situations
where productivity is very unequal (which it isn't in almost every business,
and very much isn't at Amazon)...it doesn't work.

One particularly toxic part of Amazon is that they pride themselves on only
hiring the "elite". Well, if your market cap is hundreds of billions and you
hire tens of thousands people a year...you aren't hiring the "elite"
(genuinely, there are only three or four CEOs over the past five decades who
are truly proven execs). So you have this awful culture where everyone views
themselves as this unbelievably valuable "alpha dog". Inevitably, this results
in them lighting huge stacks of other people's cash on fire (the real danger
isn't hiring the 80 IQ guy, it is the guy with a 110 IQ who thinks he is a 160
IQ guy).

~~~
amznthrowaway5
The majority of AMZN's tech employees (ie. average SDE) know they are not
elite and often talk about how they consider themselves failures for not being
getting into better paying companies.

~~~
hogFeast
I didn't say either that employees are elite or that they think themselves to
be elite. I said that is the hiring culture, which is something quite
different.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
You did say

> _So you have this awful culture where everyone views themselves as this
> unbelievably valuable "alpha dog"_

In my experience this may be true of upper management, but it simply isn't
true of most employees.

------
neonate
[http://archive.md/Y3pZT](http://archive.md/Y3pZT)

[https://outline.com/U9mAnr](https://outline.com/U9mAnr)

------
continuations
> banned third-party merchants from using (Fedex)’s ground network for the
> rest of the season

I read elsewhere that this ban is for Prime deliveries only.

So there are 3rd party sellers for Prime? I thought Prime is only for products
fulfilled by Amazon.

Do these 3rd party Prime sellers get a cut of the $119/yr Prime fees?

If they don't get a cut of the Prime fees why would they offer Prime
deliveries? Shouldn't they be offering 2-day free shipping to everyone Prime
member or not?

~~~
Judson
Turns out, Amazon has a program called Seller Fulfilled Prime. Sellers get the
prime badge, and ship from their own warehouse.

If I had to guess, the seller tells Amazon where the product is located +
their shipping cutoff time, and if the customer is in a geographic location
that is serviced by UPS/FedEx/USPS from the seller's warehouse with 2-day
transit time, and it's before the seller's cutoff, the Prime badge is shown.

More information here: [https://services.amazon.com/services/seller-fulfilled-
prime....](https://services.amazon.com/services/seller-fulfilled-prime.html)

~~~
continuations
So the sellers in this case don't even get a cut of the $119/yr Prime fees?

If that's the case why would the sellers even offer Prime shipping? Why not
offer free 2-day shipping to everyone, including those who aren't Prime
members as well?

~~~
Judson
> So the sellers in this case don't even get a cut of the $119/yr Prime fees?

That isn't mentioned in the linked Amazon information so my guess is no.

> [...] why would the sellers even offer Prime shipping? Why not offer free
> 2-day shipping to everyone[...]

FTA: "Your products listed with Seller Fulfilled Prime have increased chances
to win the Buy Box. Winning the Buy Box means that when customers click on
“Add to Basket”, their default option is to buy the product from you."

Also mentions that SFP is really for special case products. The called out
reasons include:

\- High-value items

\- Products with seasonal or unpredictable demand

\- Items with variations

\- Slow-moving goods

\- Inventory that requires special handling or preparation

~~~
blyry
Can confirm, it's all about the buy box. My company offers free 1 and 2 day
shipping to all customers across all channels in as many zips as our fc
network allows. SFP gets us the buy box with a way higher percentage and gives
us a significant boost in our Amazon revenue.

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DonnyV
This is all done because we as a society can't wait an extra day or week for
something thats non-essential.

~~~
CharlesW
We can and have. This was all done (originally with partners) because it was
necessary to make Amazon competitive with local retail. Amazon is now making
shipping/logistics part of their "stack" because, at their scale, it removes a
risky dependency, can reduce costs, may give them proprietary advantages,
provide another service to sell, etc.

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ropiwqefjnpoa
Amazon is cutting out the middle man so they can abuse their delivery
contractors and employees directly.

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hootbootscoot
doh, and here I thought this was about british techno...

