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0 pointsoutworlder5y ago0 comments

> It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use.

Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.

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txcwpalpha5y ago

You're right, and I did think of that after I clicked "reply". What I meant was that a company with so much resources doesn't seem to have that capability. Even with such a large size, I would imagine Amazon of all companies would have the resources to say "this is the design, now get on board" and make it happen.

This goes for other aspects of AWS as well, such as consistency in the way services report to CloudTrail or are referenced in CloudFormation. Overall there just seems to be little coordination amongst AWS teams, and that's always surprised me.

TimJRobinson5y ago

Teams at AWS are almost like individual companies of 5 - 15 people. When integrating with each other they do it in almost the same way external apps would. The frontend of each app is decided by each team using a shared library for UI styling and some guidelines.

This helps with iteration speed and not getting bogged down in middle management approval hell, but it does lead to inconsistency problems.

tguedes5y ago

I have read this is the intended trade-off. They want each AWS service to release new features as quickly as possible. If they were required to coordinate with other teams on UI decisions, that would slow them down.

mwilcox5y ago

Because any attempt to do that gets quickly flooded by responses about how it's just totally impractical.

Apple can do it because all of their legacy architecture and organisational structure was put in place before the internet

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