That’s pretty much it. Based on what I saw during the year that I wasted there, your statement is actually sugar-coating the reality of Amazon’s abysmal codebase. In reality, I find it hard to believe that it works at all, and having been there, I saw how many things failed routinely.

Amazon uses developers as basically babysitters for their systems, without which none of it would work.

“I think its’ mostly been DUMB LUCK that it hasn’t exploded in their faces before.”

It’s not luck, it’s lots of developer with 24×7 pager duty.

People like you don’t exist there; QA is a foreign concept to someone who just graduated from college and landed a job with a big internet company, and that is exactly the kind of person that Amazon has writing its most critical code. Amazon takes full advantage of the fact that those kids are willing to carry pagers and feel like heroes because they fixed some major issue at 2am and yet show up for a full day of work the following day, because “that’s how it’s done” there.

When I was interviewing, almost every single company that I interviewed with (around 20 phone and close to a dozen in-person) had at least one ex-Amazon employee in the interview loop, and not a one was surprised that I was looking to get less than a year after joining. (In fact, one of my co-workers at Amazon said that I’d leave soon, because the best ones always do (my co-worker’s words almost exactly) — around three months after I joined.)

Paranoid? Let’s just say I’m skeptical of systems that are so user driven that they can be taken advantage of by someone with an agenda. There’s a small group of fanatics on the right that has a long history of pulling books from libraries or setting ridiculous standards for local school boards.

It’s not unlike attempts to manipulate Google page rankings or other misinformation campaigns.

And yes, the search suggestions are derived from the way in which users search the site. You don’t really think that Amazon, one of the most gay friendly and understanding companies in the world as well as being based in the very gay friendly city of Seattle has some gaybashing executive sitting around thinking up search terms, do you?

Use your head, for just one moment, and you’ll see how paranoid and overly victimized all that makes you sound.

Completing the suggested term gay with “books” will take you to plenty of gay books. The first title returned is “Between Men: Best New Gay Fiction”

The system does not know when you type in gay at the all departments whether you want gay porn, gay books or gayle collins.

If you type in “homosexuality” as a search, it suggests as search terms:

homosexuality and the bible
homosexuality and the politics of truth
homosexuality and christianity
homosexuality and the catholic church
homosexuality and american psychiatry

The first titles that show up in a search for homosexuality are:

A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality
You Don’t Have to Be Gay
For the Bible Tells Me So
Can Homosexuality Be Healed?

All of the suggested search terms above bring up right-wing screeds against homosexuality; the one on “homosexuality and american psychiatry” brings up books from the 1980s about how the APA was “politicized” into delisting homosexuality as a disorder.

If you type in “gay” as a search term, it suggests “gayporn”, “gaydvd” and similar variants which take you to their dvd/movies section and doesn’t show you any books (like “Gay New York” for example).

So are these suggested searches completely generated by how users search at the site? If so, it seems odd that “gay” doesn’t bring up any “normal” phrase starting with that word and that “homosexuality” suggests right-wing BS for you.