Coderific

rating for Amazon.com

1.0 Worst. Company. Ever. posted on February 12, 2007

IF you're lucky, you get a decent boss who knows how to program and who shields you from the BS and goes to bat with the pointy hairs. But this can only last so long-- eventually you'll be reorganized into a group where your boss is a pointy hair. This is what happened to me, and it was the most asinine, childishly incompetant situation I've ever seen-- worse, the whole amazon culture is one of arrogance.

Arrogance is tolerable when you're dealing with people who are brilliant and who produce a lot. But not when your boss's degree is in Basket Weaving and his only experience is at amazon managing people! And his boss? No development experience. Boss's boss's boss? Nada. These people can't manage software projects, but marinated in the culture of arrogance see all their failings as failings of their employees.

Way to much buracracy. Piss poor management. Poor food. Faux frugality with the "door deskts" that cost the company more than regular office furniture... yet everyone is packed into hallways and cube farms that are noisy as hell--- more faux frugality: Not putting in ceiling tiles and going for that renovated gothic building looks nice, but the AC noise inhibits development.

That's amazon-- wasting expensive engineer hours with pointless interruptions, being on call, and noise while trumpeting their "Frugality".

There's nothing cutting edge to work on either, its all duct tape and bailing wire (eg: Perl and shell scripts.)

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  • Re: Worst. Company. Ever. posted on February 12, 2007 09:53 PM

    The door desks are nice.

    They're a bit crudely constructed, and ugly, but they will make them to fit you if you're short or tall, or want one of those standing desks, or a smaller desk. You can even get the ergonomics folks to come measure you for your desk.

    The most fun -- filing a ticket to get your desk raised by 3" or less. They come by and screw little blocks to the bottoms of the legs.

    Desks that are custom fit to you is one of the (few, if not only) perks of working at Amazon.

    Don't mess with the desks!

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  • Re: Worst. Company. Ever. posted by rash on March 10, 2007 07:17 AM

    Re: Door Desks

    Until you get a nice shirt you really like ripped by the metal braces. Or a nasty cut.

    I'm surprised door desks don't violate some safety standard.

    Then there's the irony of a company obsessed with frugality still using door desks for nostalgia even though they now cost more than real office furniture.

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  • Re: Worst. Company. Ever. posted on March 14, 2008 01:54 PM

    "There's nothing cutting edge to work on either, its all duct tape and bailing wire (eg: Perl and shell scripts.)"

    This unfortunately seems like the worst part of being here. There's not much time for any engineering with all the maintenance tasks to be done, which is worsened by the piss-poor quality of the existing software and the user-hostile tools (when they work).

    The technology on which most of this is based is ancient by tech industry standards; even the defense industry is ahead of Amazon in terms of tools and technologies. The problem is compounded by the fact that Amazon is great at recruiting and terrible at retention; it does horrible job of utilizing experienced engineers, and very little of the work we do requires much skill or experience.

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scores in this rating

development process

clear requirements 1.0
design and planning 1.0
quality assurance 1.0
automated testing 1.0
peer review 1.0
development environment 1.0
development hardware 1.0
physical workspace 1.0
infrastructure and support 1.0
issue tracking 3.0
source control 1.0
product quality 1.0

culture

cultivation of creativity 1.0
mitigation of risk 1.0
reasonable workload 1.0
prevention of crunch time 1.0
hitting deadlines 1.0
taking responsibility 1.0
development autonomy 1.0
keeping ego in check 1.0

compensation

salary 2.0
health coverage 4.0
paid time off 3.0
snacks 1.0
other perks 2.0

organization

advancement opportunities 1.0
employee retention 1.0
hiring process 1.0
quality of development management 1.0
quality of upper management 1.0
quality of developers 4.0
team-to-team communication 3.0
internal team communication 3.0
management-developer communication 1.0

general

location 4.0
nearby food 1.0
business model 3.0
cool technology 1.0
vision and strategy 1.0
warm fuzzy feeling 1.0
overall 1.0

preferences

casual dress code 4.0
use of Free Software 2.0
development of Free Software 1.0
use of GNU/Linux 4.0
use of Mac OS 1.0
use of Solaris 1.0
use of Windows 4.0
use of BSD 1.0
use of Python 1.0
use of Perl 4.0
use of Ruby 1.0
use of Lisp 1.0
use of Java 4.0
use of C# 1.0
use of Objective-C 1.0
use of C 4.0
use of C++ 1.0
use of PHP 1.0
use of ASP 1.0
use of legacy languages 1.0