Jon Kalb July 27, 2015 at 2:18 am

Three weeks ago was my last day working on the Amazon search engine. I quit my job to start a new career as a freelance C++ trainer.

I’m both excited and terrified. Wish me luck. And let me know if your company’s engineering team need to update their C++ skills.

Jon

[email protected]

Mike Reid July 27, 2015 at 4:28 pm

Congratulations, Jon!

I had no idea you worked on the Amazon search engine. Does that just mean lining up entered keywords with metadata and such from the product pages? Or does that also mean incorporating the stars on product reviews and such into the search rankings?

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Jon Kalb July 27, 2015 at 11:22 pm

Thanks, Mike.

I was a bit surprised both by what is included in the index and what is not. I worked on what A9 calls “Search Infrastructure.” This group focuses on keeping the indexes current and the queries quick. But the “secret sauce” is in the ranking and that is the responsibility of a group we call “Relevance.”

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Mike Reid July 28, 2015 at 10:25 am

Ahhh. “Relevance.”

I empathize with the excitement and terror of striking out on your own. Can I ask why you decided to make the jump?

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Jon Kalb July 29, 2015 at 8:51 am

Training full time has been a longtime goal of mine. I’ve been working toward this for years. I’m following my dream. I’ve worked hard to position myself so that I could do this.

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Mike Reid July 30, 2015 at 12:20 pm

In that case, congratulations!

I have a programmer friend who found himself much, much happier when he switched over to teaching full-time too.

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