
Well-capitalized Seattle startup seeks Unix developers – Jeff Bezos (1994) - ikeboy
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/poXLCW8udK4/_GHzqB9sG9gJ
======
Gaessaki
Reminds me of Larry Page asking how to set the User Agent in Java back in
1996:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJ...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO05LIU/ushhUIQQ-
ogJ).

We all start somewhere.

~~~
raldi
Why didn't he just google the ans- oh.

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jamestimmins
It would be interesting if someone (maybe the TripleByte folks?) did an
analysis of the words/phrasing used to recruit early employees, and compared
that to the long term financial success of the company.

I frequently see job postings that poorly articulate the company's purpose, or
focus heavily on experience with specific technologies that are easily
learned, and arguably unimportant from a hiring perspective. I suspect that
there is a negative correlation between those postings and financial
performance, but I'm curious if the numbers support that assumption.

~~~
veddox
Although I don't see Bezos saying anything about what his company actually
does... None of the modern "We're going to disrupt X industry" / "We're
democratizing Y" / "We're changing the world for the better by giving people
Z"

~~~
jamestimmins
Although it does say "pioneer commerce on the Internet", which at the time may
have have been taken as "we're selling physical goods online", as I doubt many
digital goods we're getting bought or sold online at the time.

------
dragontamer
It should be noted that this is an archived "USENET" post.

Usenet was a decentralized message board system, kinda similar to email. That
means all of the discussions that took place here are for the most part, lost
to the sands of time. There's no centralized servers in USENET, its all
decentralized.

Google Groups became one of the more popular USENET services in the early
2000s. But the archives of USENET posts are likely incomplete. Maybe someone
with more knowledge of this early internet would be able to comment on where
Google got their archives from.

More info here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
This post definitely made me feel old! Just wait until I tell you about
Gopher!

~~~
chrisdbaldwin
We often joke about making new gopher sites in our office.

------
kafkaesq
So - any data available on how well some of these people made out?

~~~
LrnByTeach
conversation with Shel Kaphan, Amazon employee #1
[http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/](http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-amazon/)

Shel Kaphan compensation ISOs shares 709,568 given @ $.0014

based on FORM S-1 filed at the time of Amazon IPO
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0000891020-9...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0000891020-97-000839.txt)

~~~
jamestimmins
So that would have cost < $1000 to exercise at the time. Amazon appears to
have had 3 stock splits (2x, 3x, and 2x) in the intervening years. Current
share price is > $1100 dollars. Meaning 709,000 orig shares * 12x from splits
* $1100/share > $9.3 billion in current value.

Is there something I'm missing here? Obviously this is assuming that none of
the stock was sold (unlikely).

~~~
gaius
He's done very well for an employee #1 (vs a founder).

Reminds me of a "startup" I worked for in the dotcom boom. I was good friends
with employee #1, he brought me on board as something like employee #30. When
we IPO'd the founders made hundreds of millions (which they subsequently lost
all of in the dotcom crash lol). But we were talking and his equity package
was basically the same as mine - we both made between 6 months and a year's
salary in the IPO - a nice chunk of change to be sure, but my friend had
worked just as hard as any of the founders and made sacrifices in terms of the
comfortable corporate job he could have had... This is a story repeated time
and time again. It very, very rarely makes sense to be an early employee. Be a
founder, or come on board later.

------
em3rgent0rdr
"you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent
people think possible"

I think (I could be wrong) that might attract the wrong type of applicants,
such as people who are arrogant or think that building such systems are easy
(and thus might not understand the complexities involved).

------
chabes
Nice, they included a fax number

------
senatorobama
Is there any point in joining a company like Amazon now?

~~~
letlambda
Yeah, they have a program that allows you to exchange your labor for capital.

------
grabcocque
I mean, gosh. They’re using some interesting tech but they’re not gonna get
anywhere using UNIX with Windows NT about to take off.

Also books. I mean I like books but who reads books in the 90s?

Really don’t bother. This company is going nowhere.

------
postit
Looks like Jonathan Wolfson made the first HN comment ever.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/9N2b9qj2nOc/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/mi.jobs/9N2b9qj2nOc/Bwwtp60GoY0J)

~~~
rsra13
That comment is from 2003 :)

~~~
rainbowmverse
It's a joke. HN-type dismissals are older than HN.

~~~
Symbiote
Were Slashdot dismissals the origin? ("No wireless. Less space than a Nomad.
Lame." from 2001.)

------
andrewwharton
Behind Google sign-in 'pay-wall'...

~~~
superkuh
I agree. It was bad enough when I needed to whitelist a handful of google
domains to run the JS needed to display simple text. But this page just flat
out won't even begin to load. After switching to a 'modern' browser I was able
to get to the simple text which I've mirrored here,
[https://pastebin.com/fFJsPc56](https://pastebin.com/fFJsPc56)

