[kevstev]

Walmart has been making lots of e-commerce acquisitions, Jet was just the biggest. A lot of it is about growing outside of the traditional walmart customer- High end brands won't sell on walmart.com, and even if they did, high end shoppers don't go to walmart.com, but they have no problem going to Jet, or Moosejaw, etc. Jet was also framed as an acqui-hire of their management team, in particular Marc Lore. How true that is, I can't really say- another way to put it is, this seemed to be a move that came from above e-commerce.

The strategy is more about reaching different customers, and gobbling up potential competitors while they are small. The frontends may look a lot different, but its all one backend (or at least that is the end state for these acquired companies).

From my perspective, Walmart.com is finally seeing customer facing improvements as they have finally completed the backend re-write and migration which took literal years and held up most customer-facing work. Rewriting the FE, while not a small undertaking, is actually not that difficult to do with their architecture. Compare that to say Amazon, who I interviewed with, and they admitted that changing say the "Amazon orange"color to something else would be a herculean effort involving a year of planning across the entire company and lock step releases across the company. They seemed to think they had a better way of doing things, but after hearing that, I wasn't so sure I wanted to work there.

[geitir]

I feel with Amazon you can intrinsically tell by the formatting and lack of consistency in design between pages the hodgepodge of code running

[kevstev]

Indeed. And listen every business needs to make tradeoffs, especially when you are just getting started. The job was described to me as running the "front page of Amazon" which of course sounded very exciting. I went to final stages there and it became clear that I was really going to be running a content management system, which is a bit different than I thought the job would be, but fine. But my last on-site at HQ, they really seemed to have a tunnel vision view on the problem, and just how siloed each team was became clear. I forget the specific question they asked that made it clear that changing any color would be a herculean undertaking, but I remember just being annoyed at how they seemed to have this air of superiority that they did things so much better than others, and seemed dissatisfied with my answers- to the extent that at one point I felt the need to make it very clear that to change the Walmart logo consistently, or turn it from blue to yellow or whatever, would be a simple change I could push from my laptop and have live within an hour. They were implying I couldn't handle the complexity and scale of their site, and I was in disbelief at the mess they had made of it.

Honestly the whole recruiting process had turned me off. They had reached out to me, and they baited me with the run the "front page of amazon" hook. I knew things were not headed in a great direction where I was, and it was right before bonus/vesting, so while I was not yet actively looking, I said just have a talk, make some contacts there. The recruiter I spoke to was unlike any I had spoken to, he felt like he worked out of a call center. He made it clear the position was based out of Austin, and I wasn't looking to relocate. It also became clear to me that this guy was just trying to fill this role, he had zero interest in trying to see what else was open where I might fit. Even though I wasn't looking to relocate, I figured I could wow them and either get them to relent on relocation or find a more local role that would fit. 6 months and several rounds later I finally get an on-site. At this point though, I had started actively looking, and by the time I got on the plane, had 3 offers in hand. I wouldn't have gotten on the plane, but I did kind of want to see the process through, I had never been to Seattle before and had a friend there.

I was really disappointed in the whole thing really, particularly their recruiting process.