[throwaway_4ever]

Notice a difference between the first Echo from 2015 and today’s?

No?

Well they still had us rewrite the entire OS, not once, but twice, and maintain all three OS’s across 10+ different devices…

They did the same damn thing with the API to cloud servers. Every couple years, new deprecation and new way to do things. Promo driven development out the wazoo while ironically quoting “customer obsession”

Zero ability to influence direction as IC. All top down initiatives from directors planned a year in advance.

[chimprich]

> Notice a difference between the first Echo from 2015 and today’s?

The later versions seem to be marginally less capable of understanding speech and far more annoying.

"Alexa, play romantic music!" "Here's 100 top romantic death metal hits! By the way, did you know I can produce fart noises? Just ask, Alexa, blah blah blah"

"Customer obsession" is a joke.

[raverbashing]

Interesting. Sounds like Google syndrome. Why do you need to rewrite the OS 3 times for a speaker with mic?

[throwaway_4ever]

First OS was scrappy to MVP hardware and prove the market. But instead of iterating, they decided to fork Android so they could scale up a workforce who can only understand Java, not C++, to deliver features. Then they realized Android is too bulky for cheap chips, so back to custom C++, that just like the first is a trash fire for rando devs to deliver features fast under a whip.

[acdha]

Thanks for filling in those details - that makes sense for having so many people busy on things which aren’t customer-visible.