They're not just buying a pile of code. They're also buying an energized and engaged team that they hope will be able to modernize Walmart's ecommerce systems. They wouldn't have gotten that if they had purchased a broken failure of a company somewhere down the road.
It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales.
We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers.
The few smart people left here are super excited to jump over to Jet ASAP.
https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?
We have close to 2,000 of them, and maybe 100-200 I would consider proficient in any type of technical role.
There was a massive push to hire as many developers as possible, so recruiting extended offers to everyone that applied. Senior engineers who have no degree or have ever worked at a tech company before.
I have no problem working with people who are capable of doing the work we need them to do.
Isn't that a problem with the recruiting dept ? and not generally with the Indians ? If the recruiters are not doing a good job, why blame your coworkers ?
You don't understand big company politics. Number of reports determines whether a person is a manager, senior manager, or director and makes $120k, $170k, or $350k. The main metric of how good a manager is is simply butts in seat. Actually doing stuff doesn't matter.
The node.js front end is on its second complete rewrite in the last 2 years, and a huge source of the scaling issues. Almost all the backend is still in Java.
An army of below average engineers working in a language with no compile time type checking is a guaranteed recipe for writing unmaintainable code that needs to be constantly rewritten.
As far as I know, Walmart labs is active in nodejs, front end and instrumentation. That's cool and all, but Jet knows how to build a lot more difficult things than that, like personalization, promotion planning, pricing strategies, etc.
For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.
Ya, the thing is they probably couldn't. Not really. It's not just about money. Think about how many big companies (including WalMart!) have plenty of money but don't have the internal talent or culture to really drive change and innovate in ways they never have before. Companies are funny things. A lot of the time they can do what they can do and really just can't do what they can't do no matter how much money they throw at the problem. Sometimes (though definitely not always!) an acquisition can really help.
