rating for Amazon.com

Massive legacy codepiles... posted on January 31, 2008

Most of the SDEs here spend most of their time trying to keep the hack-filled legacy systems alive, rather than doing any development or engineering.

Computing resources... minimal. Amazon buys budget computers for everyone, and refuses to retire them until they're three years old, so it's quite common for developers to be working on computers that haven't even been in production for a year or two, and weren't anywhere close to state of the art when Amazon bought them.

There's not much engineering going on here. Most of the work is entry-level stuff; bug fixes, integration, some optimization. Between that and the ticket rotation, very few people here have time to do any development.

The technology is mostly ancient. A lot of mission-critical software is written in Perl, and relies heavily on constant reboots to stay alive. Very little of the company's mission critical software isn't ready for production. The code is largely undocumented and very brittle.

One side effect of this is that it makes adopting new technologies harder; Amazon has not moved up to jdk 1.6 yet, and there's even some software that requires jdk 1.4.

Benefits are stingy... the leave policy is atrocious. If you are considering working here, ask for more leave; the default is 2 weeks and a measly six holidays (no, that's not a joke). They've realized that they can't hire anyone senior with such stingy benefits, but they're still not willing to revise their policy... instead managers make under-the-table deals with recruits because most of the teams are chronically understaffed.

On the bright side, the company does a good job of hiring good developers. It just doesn't do a good job of using the skills that they interview for.

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