Coderific

rating for Amazon.com

1.0 Glad I'm Gone posted on October 12, 2006

I worked for 3 years, until late 2005.

Ego-driven company with a strong practice towards cronyism. That's great if you are from the companies and schools that are worshipped, terrible otherwise.

They try to portray meritocracy. Really, that's only true if you fit a very narrow mold and are willing to make AMZN your #1 priority in life (over sleep, compensation, relationships). Managers noted when you weren't there before them, left before them. Many people were scared to take their vacation time.

Company policy forbids instant messenger clients from being used inside the building, working from home is nearly impossible due to proprietary VPN hardware that only works with your company laptop. Hard to get any special/preferred software, no rights to install drivers on your company laptop, for instance. Cannot bring personal hardware in, either.

Company policy also forbids any freelance work- no side businesses.

Constant complaints about cheapness of company, lack of compensation. Company discount saves up to $100 per year, no more than that. Half of employees leave within 2.5 years.

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  • Re: Glad I'm Gone posted on December 31, 2006 01:46 PM

    Oh, yes, I forgot about the proprietary VPN. The laptops used *dial in* modem. There was a hardware broadband VPN option being considered, but it would have to be paid for by employees. (Now reflect on this a moment: employees who wanted to work. WTF is up with that?) SVPs and up have Blackberries.

    There's also constant snooping that goes on. If you install something, their scripts will send your manager mail asking what the application is. Request one of the corporate-licensed products, your manager gets mail. Take a class, your manager gets mail. Etc. Getting Photoshop to do my job required begging an SVP for signoff.

    The company discount, $100 per year, is merely a 10% off Amazon coupon.

    reply | quote

  • Re: Glad I'm Gone posted on January 10, 2007 01:02 PM

    Note that they now have broadband, wireless enabled VPNs. The dialups are history.

    reply | quote

  • Re: Glad I'm Gone posted on July 11, 2007 09:54 PM

    Dialup isn't history. Have your VPN device go bad while oncall, and all you'll get is the party line "Dialup is the only access pattern that we support on a tier 1 basis. VPN is just an extra we provide."

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scores in this rating

development process

clear requirements 3.0
design and planning 3.0
quality assurance 2.0
automated testing 2.0
peer review 3.0
development environment 2.0
development hardware 1.0
physical workspace 1.0
infrastructure and support 1.0
issue tracking 2.0
source control 3.0
product quality 2.0

culture

cultivation of creativity 2.0
mitigation of risk 1.0
reasonable workload 1.0
prevention of crunch time 1.0
hitting deadlines 1.0
taking responsibility 2.0
development autonomy 2.0
keeping ego in check 1.0

compensation

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

organization

advancement opportunities 2.0
employee retention 1.0
hiring process 3.0
quality of development management 2.0
quality of upper management 1.0
quality of developers 3.0
team-to-team communication 2.0
internal team communication 3.0
management-developer communication 2.0

general

location 2.0
nearby food 1.0
business model 3.0
cool technology 2.0
vision and strategy 2.0
warm fuzzy feeling 1.0
overall 1.0

preferences

casual dress code 3.0
use of Free Software 2.0
development of Free Software 1.0
use of GNU/Linux 4.0
use of Mac OS 2.0
use of Solaris 1.0
use of Windows 1.0
use of BSD unrated
use of Python 1.0
use of Perl 3.0
use of Ruby 1.0
use of Lisp 2.0
use of Java 4.0
use of C# 1.0
use of Objective-C unrated
use of C 3.0
use of C++ 4.0
use of PHP unrated
use of ASP unrated
use of legacy languages unrated