Coderific

rating for Amazon.com

4.0 A good place to work posted on February 11, 2007

I've heard plenty of complaints from people about the on-call duty at Amazon, but any company that's been around for more than a year is going to have teams that must support legacy software that is poorly designed by current standards. Also like all companies, Amazon has it's fair share of bad managers & teams but there are also plenty of teams at Amazon that are really enjoyable and don't have massive amounts of pager-duty.

The team that I'm on is great: our support burden is light, our 'development autonomy' is very high, and all of my team-mates are incredibly capable and intelligent. The downside is that our manager isn't that great, but I know that we could have much worse as a manager. Although my job isn't perfect, it's definitely enough to keep me very happy.

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  • Re: A good place to work posted on February 12, 2007 03:53 PM

    You've been at the company 6 months. In a year, you'll be singing a different tune. The re-orgs happen once a year at least.

    Teams with good people on them are not that rare at Amazon, that's true. But low quality managers are the source of what Amazon sucks as a place to work. And eventually yours will grind you down, or get replaced by one who does.

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  • Re: A good place to work posted on February 24, 2007 02:27 AM

    Amen to this reply.

    Think about it, "it's a pretty cool place to work... if you can avoid any legacy stuff". Well, I have news for you, the main portions of the company are entirely "legacy". The new "web services" stuff is not legacy, but it will become soon. One aspect of Amazon is due to the tech foundation, things tend to go to hell faster than the speed of light. Perl is a maintainability nightmare most the time, there is no reasonable documentation, systems design or control, nonexistent change management, C++ base that sucks, etc, etc, etc.

    The problem is all the good things about working for Amazon are due to individual teams and managers - and the yearly reorgs can fuck you over good.

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scores in this rating

development process

clear requirements 2.0
design and planning 2.0
quality assurance 3.0
automated testing 3.0
peer review 4.0
development environment 3.0
development hardware 4.0
physical workspace 2.0
infrastructure and support 4.0
issue tracking 3.0
source control 3.0
product quality 4.0

culture

cultivation of creativity 3.0
mitigation of risk 3.0
reasonable workload 2.0
prevention of crunch time 2.0
hitting deadlines 2.0
taking responsibility 4.0
development autonomy 4.0
keeping ego in check 3.0

compensation

salary 3.0
health coverage 3.0
paid time off 1.0
snacks 2.0
other perks 2.0

organization

advancement opportunities 2.0
employee retention 2.0
hiring process 4.0
quality of development management 2.0
quality of upper management 3.0
quality of developers 4.0
team-to-team communication 3.0
internal team communication 4.0
management-developer communication 3.0

general

location 4.0
nearby food 3.0
business model 4.0
cool technology 4.0
vision and strategy 3.0
warm fuzzy feeling 4.0
overall 4.0

preferences

casual dress code 4.0
use of Free Software 4.0
development of Free Software 4.0
use of GNU/Linux 4.0
use of Mac OS 2.0
use of Solaris unrated
use of Windows 2.0
use of BSD unrated
use of Python unrated
use of Perl 3.0
use of Ruby 3.0
use of Lisp unrated
use of Java 4.0
use of C# unrated
use of Objective-C unrated
use of C unrated
use of C++ 4.0
use of PHP unrated
use of ASP unrated
use of legacy languages unrated