Coderific

Re: Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great posted on July 11, 2007 06:20 AM

Perhaps you are able to stand up to incompetent engineers, because you have been at Amazon.com for a long time, have senior in your job title or are somehow revered. There are also political engineers and managers and you can be hurt by them if you give them the benefit of the doubt. When I was at Amazon, I assumed some incompetent people weren't incompetent but simply had too much work to do like me. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and when the project was over got bitten.

I worked hard at Amazon.com and was let down simply because my manager of the day, didn't take the time to understand what was going on. He found it just too easy to keep quiet and to forget the proof of what happened that was available for everybody.

Just curious, but have you ever been woken up 4 times during the same week to deal with either imaginary problems or problems caused by other people?

Have you ever worked hard for a week fixing memory corruption bugs caused by other people only to get savaged by a manager because you weren't able to manage a bad software engineer of his on another project?

The managers at Amazon.com, don't manage. They keep clean hands and push all the work down on software engineers.

All in all though, Amazon.com is a unique place and I'm very glad I worked there.

I suspect you have never had to endue a project with 1 political project manager, 1 don't care/nontechnical manager and one political, incompetent software developer. And all the time having to fix bugs caused by other people in unrelated areas and work on the project at the same time.

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Re: Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great posted by rash on July 13, 2007 09:07 PM

Of the several companies I've worked at, mostly Fortune 100, Amazon had by far the worst code base and worst software engineering process. By far. And scaling problems that were actually contained compared to some of my previous employers.

There was also one particular anti-pattern at Amazon that really bugged me, and that was employees getting rewarded for fixing problems they'd created (not on purpose -- I think). Generally one was better off having a lot of manual workarounds to generate visibility and look like a hero, rather than actually making the software work well.

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Re: Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great posted on August 10, 2007 03:59 PM

So much for being a 'not very good engineer'.

I can say this, you need to have the willingness to play the political game at amazon. The more amazing thing is the company used to (still does?) think it was 'politics free'. This became less and less true over the years.

I hear from my friends and contacts that Amazon has sort of woken up to the huge fuck-up and started to treat engineer satisfaction and retention seriously. I suppose after various key engineers defected that was a major wake up. Also that the attrition is so mind-bendingly huge you can't ignore it anymore.

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Re: Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great posted by Tamerlin on March 14, 2008 04:31 PM

There I agree completely. It's hard to deny it, really. Our group is trying to improve its development process, but it's an uphill battle for a variety of reasons, one of those being that the existing software is pretty critical, and we barely have enough staff to keep it going, let alone design new software that's actually maintainable. Of course, this leads to a self-perpetuating cycle, because good developers don't like bug-hunting and maintenance jobs, but we don't have time for much else.

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Re: Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great posted on June 07, 2008 11:50 PM

Amazon has a pretty good developers but most of those skills really need not be used. Coding level required is pretty entry level. Amount of time spent on coding is very low: 25%. The toughest design and coding questions faced at Amazon will be during the interview and not on the job.

Operational burden is high (wake up at 3 AM to the melody of your pager) to fix issues due to management frugality not only not to spend resources for QA but also not to share operational burden arising out of this frugality.

Amazon's distributed system is one of the largest in the world, but distributedness does not make things technically complicated. Its much more involved to code and maintain a mission-critical multi-threaded system, than a one isolated part of a business oriented distributed system. While distributedness is the right choice for Amazon, developers who start their first job here and stick around for a long time will be ill prepared to transition to building mission critical systems later.

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