8 ms·

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company de

by jordanb 16y ago

Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence. In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with... In fact, ever-increasing engineering costs would be just as indicative of mounting technical debt as it would of an increasing commitment to R&D.

petercooper 16y ago
In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have. That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.
- mikle 16y ago
  More than that, it is very easy for only one programmer or researcher doing a bad job to create technical debt that will take disproportional time to pay off.
- daeken 16y ago
  I thought about going to Amazon when I decided to get out of the startup world about 6 months ago. I went through the standard application process, and promptly closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format -- rejected PDFs, HTML, and even plaintext. It may seem like a silly reason not to work somewhere, but I think that the hiring process says more about a company than just about anything else.
  - webspiderus 16y ago
    I pretty much do the same - mostly since I decided to typeset my resume a while ago, and converting it to anything, particularly MS Word, just feels like a travesty.
  - flink 16y ago
    I've never applied for a job at Amazon but I have done the same thing with other companies. When I was last looking for a job, I found a couple of interesting positions whose HR systems would only take resumes in MS Word. I closed the tab and kept searching. For me, it's a practical and ideological thing. My resume is written in LaTeX (with a plain text version) and unless I'm missing something, there is no good or easy way to convert from LaTeX to MS Word. I also have doubts about a company that insists on word documents - it smells like inflexibility and a heavy-handed top down management approach.
    - esrauch 16y ago
      I think the source of this is that they use third party tools that automatically store/index/rip apart your resume for keywords. Theres obviously no reason why the third party tools don't support plaintext files, but it seems that they don't. Considering Amazon didn't develop the system, I don't think the choice of software by the HR department is really something that is safe to make generalizations from.
      - smutticus 16y ago
        <quote> All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. </quote> According to Bezos you're wrong. If technology infuses all of their processes that also includes hiring. And let's not forget Conway's law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law Everything matters. If only because good people will ignore companies that have stupid hiring processes.
        esrauch 16y ago
        I honestly think its a bit of a stretch to think that Bezos was talking about the HR department when he said that. Do you think he was talking about the people that vacuum the floors and sell sandwiches in the cafeteria too?
  - MatthewPhillips 16y ago
    You're talking about HR here; they have no idea how to use anything other than Word. The idea of opening a PDF is foreign to their way of doing business, not just because a lack of know how, but because these are people who are very rigid in their processes. If I were to disregard companies that require Word I'd probably be unable to get a job where I live. I just disregard it, and what their qualifications supposedly are.
    - jordanb 16y ago
      Word-only resumes indicate that the HR department is in control of the hiring process. This means that the company is passing up on excellent people for stupid reasons ("We're looking for people with "Unix" experience but this candidate only lists "Linux" and "BSD") and hiring incompetent people who happened to have won the Bingo game. So the HR department is in the driver's seat on hiring is a good proxy for determining how good their engineering is. Personally I think a better indicator than if a company is they Word-only or not is the quality of their job postings. HR is not competent to write job descriptions for engineers, and the idiotic descriptions that get passed around the internet are almost always an indicator that hiring is "HR's responsibility."
      - MatthewPhillips 16y ago
        Those job descriptions are stuff they find on the internet. It's divorced from the reality of the position; you only find that out when you do an actual interview. I'm not saying there aren't places where HR is in control of the hiring processes, but I also know from person experience that it can be the case where HR is in charge of posting positions and taking applications to simply hand off to Programming.
  - HockeyBiasDotCo 16y ago
    I am truly surpised by the rigidness displayed regarding Word docs. Limiting opportunities in your life because an HR department uses the most common document app in the world seems self-defeating. Why not rule out cmapanies that use a certain type of printer paper?
    - mavelikara 16y ago
      I have no problems with whatever document app the HR team is using. If they send me a doc file, I will read the information contained therein. In creating a document the author puts in more work than the reader; so as long as the format is not too onerous the author should be able to choose whatever tool is convenient to him/her. I hope that you agree that txt and pdf files are just as convenient formats to read as doc ones. IMHO it is irritating when someone insists that any document you send them should be in the format of the application they write documents with. Furthermore, these are no absolutes. If the State asks me to send a document in doc format, I will. Despite pretenses, these companies (and HR depts) are not Republic of Greater Timbuktu really - so I will skip, thank you. :)
    - ZoFreX 16y ago
      It's a "bad smell". Too many bad smells and you don't apply for a job, it's like Bayesian filtering.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        Bayesian filtering that works both ways. In fact we currently take PDF/Word/txt/RTF at my job. I'd actual considering narrowing it down to just Word. The type of person who decides that they don't want to submit in Word is probably a type of person that's not a good cultural fit. And I guess we've already ruled out those that prefer to send their resume via smoke signals only. As an employer it is more important to find good cultural fits than it is as an employee, since it is typically easier for employees to leave than it is to fire them.
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    Of course, that goes both way. Any engineer so fixated on not using Microsoft Word, and unwilling to submit a resume in the format requested by their potential employer, might not work out well in a number of environments where they might gasp be required to use operating systems, applications, and methodologies that they were unfamiliar with, or downright opposed to. Works out well for everyone - so, to some degree, a valid filter.
    - nerfhammer 16y ago
      Not everyone owns a copy of Word these days
      - natrius 16y ago
        That's ridiculous. There are plenty of programs that output MS Word format, or even RTF.
        danudey 16y ago
        Sure, but most of them aren't 100%, and tend to lose formatting nuances. My resume looks awful when exported to MS Word, so I always have to load it up in a pirated copy or on someone else's computer, tweak it there, and then send it on. I hate the idea of using commercial software that I haven't paid for, so it just irks me that this is required.
        tzury 16y ago
        dude, in some companies these days, you better off not mentioning MS WORD as an integral part of your toolbox. Want an impressive resume? Think latex! Want an even more impressive? Build up your resume and portfolio online.
        quanticle 16y ago
        Yeah, but the MS Word format is vague enough, that the only way to ensure that someone else sees the same document you're seeing is to ensure that they're opening the document on the same version of Word, with the same OS and the same fonts that you have.
  - DavidSJ 16y ago
    I never went to college. I submitted a PDF résumé. Amazon hired me.
  - technomancy 16y ago
    > closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format Why not just send it in a decent format and see what happens? Just because they say they'll reject it doesn't mean they will.
    - daeken 16y ago
      I did -- I initially just dropped it in there, then saw the ".doc only" notice after it errored out.
  - jsolson 16y ago
    This is... odd. I started at Amazon in January, and as of November, plain text was the preferred format for resumes. Then again, mine got into the system through the employee referral program, so perhaps it takes different inputs.
  - jontas 16y ago
    For what it's worth, their job site now says you paste your resume into a box: http://www.amazon.com/How-Apply-Help-Careers-Homepage/b/ref=amb_link_6001432_4?ie=UTF8&node=239370011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0CV8CN2Z0JZ599B2C4AR&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=434481001&pf_rd_i=203348011 http://www.amazon.com/How-Apply-Help-Careers-Homepage/b/ref=... I don't know about 6 months ago, perhaps their policy has changed.
- mlinsey 16y ago
  I was hired with no college degree, when Microsoft and Google would not even consider me on that basis. Also, for Amazon and other companies, there is a world of difference going through their public-facing recruiting process and getting to know someone on an interesting team through your network, and getting hired through them.
  - zecho 16y ago
    I'm sure the same rules of networking apply anywhere, though, including Microsoft and Google. Degrees are an HR filter, but networking can bypass HR. So it goes.
petrilli 16y ago
I get the feeling that you're both right and wrong. Right in that a lot of the legacy Amazon code is probably burdened with huge technical debt. I also get the feeling they're pushing the boundaries in other areas. A bit of the "chase the shiny coin" syndrome. One of the issues is that none of us really know what goes on inside Amazon. They are notoriously secretive about most everything.
- billswift 16y ago
  "Secrecy is the beginning of stupidity." It both reduces feedback, often dramatically, and wastes your time and energy in maintaining the secrecy.
  - TWADDLE 16y ago
    unless its APPL....
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Apple's ticker symbol is AAPL.
  - neuroelectronic 16y ago
    Yes, because users always know exactly what they want and provide valuable feedback..
chrismealy 16y ago
Yegge left a long time ago.
pkteison 16y ago
I've seen some negative stories about working at Amazon. I don't recall seeing anybody write that it's a great place to program. Anybody have any stories or links about the upside?
- jmelloy 16y ago
  I know a lot of people who work/have worked there, and it seems to be a very love it or hate it company. They work people hard, but the people who like that kind of environment thrive. They seem to be pretty ruthless about improving in certain areas and are very metric-focused. I'm not sure it's a great place to program, but it's certainly a great place to learn about programming.
  - technomancy 16y ago
    I've heard it is very dependent upon the team.
- aphexairlines 16y ago
  The upside is that the company has excellent developer tools and infrastructure (I mean aside from AWS), very accessible principal engineers, a huge amount of paying customers so your work has real impact, and it seems like most teams have autonomy to work and deliver in their own way. Within a week or two of joining I was given ownership of an important internal product while also getting up to speed on the main event (the retail website). The technical challenges are there for the taking. I also mentioned some of this at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488980 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488980
  - abeppu 16y ago
    The opportunity to have an impact cannot be overstated. I worked at A9, the search subsidiary of Amazon. Given that a substantial portion of purchases go through search, we were always keenly aware that even improvements that appeared to be modest could have very substantial impacts to the bottom line.
haberman 16y ago
I worked at Amazon from 2004-2007. On one hand, Amazon does some really excellent and novel work like Dynamo and AWS (S3, EC2, EBS, etc). They organize developer conferences and bring in really good people to lecture. They hire really solid distributed systems people like Pat Helland and give them reign to work with engineering teams to improve their designs. On the other hand, when you're in the trenches of a product team at Amazon, good engineering takes a back seat to features, deadlines, and keeping everything running. There was an incredible amount of pressure from the top to maintain high levels of service, but not a lot of support for taking the time to refactor or rework those systems to address the underlying causes of service disruption. Everything was always an emergency, but we always had to make the shallow fixes. Overall, I'm much happier at Google where there is a lot of support for good engineering at all levels of the organization, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.
- puredemo 16y ago
  Too bad that Google doesn't touch the customer service standards at Amazon.
  - VB6_Foreverr 16y ago
    I bought an xbox and a game for it at the same time from amazon. The xbox was fine the game disk was defective. I contacted amazon via my account, got a call from a human in less than a half hour (mainly I'd say to confirm the xbox itself was OK), received the new game a couple of days later and a refund of my return costs for the game itself. The only (very) slight quibble I'd have was that the postage on the return exceeded what they refunded. They made the return process itself simple by emailing me barcoded return labels and frequent reminders. I feel very confident buying off amazon a lot more so than ebay for example
- chaddeshon 16y ago
  Good engineering can't take a backseat to features, deadlines, and keeping things running. Good engineering IS features, deadlines, and keeping things running. If you aren't making features and meeting deadlines you aren't engineering anything. You're just messing around. Features and deadlines are the difference between science and engineering. There's never enough time, that's what makes it hard. Of course, Amazon might be pushing time tables too far. I have no idea, and it seems like you do.
tmarthal 16y ago
Maybe not working at Amazon, but their suite of companies are still technically innovating : their http://www.a2z.com http://www.a2z.com subsidiary is doing some amazing stuff, with top-tier talent.
dustinupdyke 16y ago
I don't see technical excellence having a lot to do with technical debt in terms of if you are excellent, you have little or no debt. Business needs change too quickly for a system as large as Amazon; they simply cannot maintain net zero technical debt and not cripple their reaction time in the market. The key is to know what level of debt is necessary and acceptable to take on and deal with going forward.
tybris 16y ago
I would say the opposite is true. Amazon is a collection of largely independent product teams that make their own decisions and share very little code. Infrastructure services are used based on its merit. Stuff that works stays, things that don't die out. Unlike most tech. companies that depend on large, common infrastructure, Amazon is carefully designed to evolve. Main problem is that a new family of species called AWS is so well-adapted and successful that its population is rapidly outgrowing some of the older, less dynamic species on which it depends. You can call that technical debt. I'd call it progress.
aphexairlines 16y ago
> 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product That was a long time ago. As Jeff Bezos confirms in the article, Amazon is a constellation of services now.
nika 16y ago
I worked at Amazon. Amazon is a company with a strong corporate culture, but this culture does not reflect reality. They talk about "door desks" and like to think they are a startup- but the door desks actually cost them more than if they bought regular office furniture. I can only speak of the areas where I worked, but none of the management, even at the lowest levels, was made up of engineers. My boss had his degree in criminal justice! He originally wanted to be a prison guard, but someone somehow got him a job at Amazon. His mentality was that of a prison guard, and by the time I left, he had driven away %60 of the engineers in our team from mistreatment. His boss (she wasn't an engineer either) backed him up and it was that way all the way up the chain of command. It is really hard to write software in an environment where the boss thinks all the employees are lazy, thinks that changing his mind all the time is ok, and that any delays this causes or complaints are insubordination. In fact, it was not uncommon for him to tell us to work on some system that was not part of our area, because he didn't understand how the software was structured. We had a big chunk of responsibility, but more than once he chewed us out for bugs that were in code handled by other groups! One of the other sayings is "B players hire C people, but A players hire A people". The hiring process is extremely arbitrary-- for instance the guy with a criminal justice degree was interviewing programmers and in order to get hired you had to get his thumbs up. The offices were way overcrowded. Probably four times the density of any of the startups I worked for (and about 8 times the density of Microsoft). I worked in a hall, and I was lucky. It was noisy and a high interruption environment. The pay is mediocre and they like to play games with your compensation, including promising things and then not delivering. As others have pointed out, the code base is a mess. The company is in the habit of rushing off in some direction and then dropping the project. For instance, they used to have movie listings and restaurant menus on their site. They also used to (or maybe still do) have a search engine. So they force code changes across the ecommerce codebase to support these things, and then, once the feature is launched the team is moved onto something else. When I left the restaurant menus and mail order catalogs were several years old. This produces a lot of cruft. As a result, they have a lot of engineers and a lot of engineer turnover. They have the same random changes in direction as any company. (I remember one thanksgiving we had to give up because Bezos changed his mind on thanksgiving eve about something we'd raised several weeks earlier and could have taken care of in plenty of time)... but since things are so poorly managed these changes in direction involve a lot of time and wasted effort. They hire a lot of H1B people. Good people and I enjoyed working with them, but this was one of the sources of engineer turnover. The poor treatment and poor environment generally meant that engineering projects were slow and expensive. This is why Amazon spends a lot on R&D. Not because they are really innovative. I think that probably %3 of their engineering effort is made up of really innovative engineers who are insulated enough to actually cut new ground. The rest of the workforce-- no matter how talented the engineers may be-- are hobbled by the code base and the extremely poor management structure. No question it was the worst company I've ever worked for-- and I've had some intense painful startup experiences. Amazon is a retailer that thinks it is an engineering company, led by people who don't know how, or don't care to, produce a good engineering environment. They really care about fulfillment and customer service, but they don't really care about their engineers and have no clue about how to be innovative (generally). But Bezos likes to go out and make pronouncements-- like a politician-- about how he cares about R&D and how critical engineering is, and all that kind of bunk.

by jordanb 16y ago

petercooper 16y ago

In my experience, their tech job listings list tech degrees as a must-have. That seems to be a common attribute of companies that care more about HR box ticking than technical excellence, alas.

mikle 16y ago
More than that, it is very easy for only one programmer or researcher doing a bad job to create technical debt that will take disproportional time to pay off.
daeken 16y ago
I thought about going to Amazon when I decided to get out of the startup world about 6 months ago. I went through the standard application process, and promptly closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format -- rejected PDFs, HTML, and even plaintext. It may seem like a silly reason not to work somewhere, but I think that the hiring process says more about a company than just about anything else.
- webspiderus 16y ago
  I pretty much do the same - mostly since I decided to typeset my resume a while ago, and converting it to anything, particularly MS Word, just feels like a travesty.
- flink 16y ago
  I've never applied for a job at Amazon but I have done the same thing with other companies. When I was last looking for a job, I found a couple of interesting positions whose HR systems would only take resumes in MS Word. I closed the tab and kept searching. For me, it's a practical and ideological thing. My resume is written in LaTeX (with a plain text version) and unless I'm missing something, there is no good or easy way to convert from LaTeX to MS Word. I also have doubts about a company that insists on word documents - it smells like inflexibility and a heavy-handed top down management approach.
  - esrauch 16y ago
    I think the source of this is that they use third party tools that automatically store/index/rip apart your resume for keywords. Theres obviously no reason why the third party tools don't support plaintext files, but it seems that they don't. Considering Amazon didn't develop the system, I don't think the choice of software by the HR department is really something that is safe to make generalizations from.
    - smutticus 16y ago
      <quote> All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. </quote> According to Bezos you're wrong. If technology infuses all of their processes that also includes hiring. And let's not forget Conway's law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law Everything matters. If only because good people will ignore companies that have stupid hiring processes.
      - esrauch 16y ago
        I honestly think its a bit of a stretch to think that Bezos was talking about the HR department when he said that. Do you think he was talking about the people that vacuum the floors and sell sandwiches in the cafeteria too?
- MatthewPhillips 16y ago
  You're talking about HR here; they have no idea how to use anything other than Word. The idea of opening a PDF is foreign to their way of doing business, not just because a lack of know how, but because these are people who are very rigid in their processes. If I were to disregard companies that require Word I'd probably be unable to get a job where I live. I just disregard it, and what their qualifications supposedly are.
  - jordanb 16y ago
    Word-only resumes indicate that the HR department is in control of the hiring process. This means that the company is passing up on excellent people for stupid reasons ("We're looking for people with "Unix" experience but this candidate only lists "Linux" and "BSD") and hiring incompetent people who happened to have won the Bingo game. So the HR department is in the driver's seat on hiring is a good proxy for determining how good their engineering is. Personally I think a better indicator than if a company is they Word-only or not is the quality of their job postings. HR is not competent to write job descriptions for engineers, and the idiotic descriptions that get passed around the internet are almost always an indicator that hiring is "HR's responsibility."
    - MatthewPhillips 16y ago
      Those job descriptions are stuff they find on the internet. It's divorced from the reality of the position; you only find that out when you do an actual interview. I'm not saying there aren't places where HR is in control of the hiring processes, but I also know from person experience that it can be the case where HR is in charge of posting positions and taking applications to simply hand off to Programming.
- HockeyBiasDotCo 16y ago
  I am truly surpised by the rigidness displayed regarding Word docs. Limiting opportunities in your life because an HR department uses the most common document app in the world seems self-defeating. Why not rule out cmapanies that use a certain type of printer paper?
  - mavelikara 16y ago
    I have no problems with whatever document app the HR team is using. If they send me a doc file, I will read the information contained therein. In creating a document the author puts in more work than the reader; so as long as the format is not too onerous the author should be able to choose whatever tool is convenient to him/her. I hope that you agree that txt and pdf files are just as convenient formats to read as doc ones. IMHO it is irritating when someone insists that any document you send them should be in the format of the application they write documents with. Furthermore, these are no absolutes. If the State asks me to send a document in doc format, I will. Despite pretenses, these companies (and HR depts) are not Republic of Greater Timbuktu really - so I will skip, thank you. :)
  - ZoFreX 16y ago
    It's a "bad smell". Too many bad smells and you don't apply for a job, it's like Bayesian filtering.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      Bayesian filtering that works both ways. In fact we currently take PDF/Word/txt/RTF at my job. I'd actual considering narrowing it down to just Word. The type of person who decides that they don't want to submit in Word is probably a type of person that's not a good cultural fit. And I guess we've already ruled out those that prefer to send their resume via smoke signals only. As an employer it is more important to find good cultural fits than it is as an employee, since it is typically easier for employees to leave than it is to fire them.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Of course, that goes both way. Any engineer so fixated on not using Microsoft Word, and unwilling to submit a resume in the format requested by their potential employer, might not work out well in a number of environments where they might gasp be required to use operating systems, applications, and methodologies that they were unfamiliar with, or downright opposed to. Works out well for everyone - so, to some degree, a valid filter.
  - nerfhammer 16y ago
    Not everyone owns a copy of Word these days
    - natrius 16y ago
      That's ridiculous. There are plenty of programs that output MS Word format, or even RTF.
      - danudey 16y ago
        Sure, but most of them aren't 100%, and tend to lose formatting nuances. My resume looks awful when exported to MS Word, so I always have to load it up in a pirated copy or on someone else's computer, tweak it there, and then send it on. I hate the idea of using commercial software that I haven't paid for, so it just irks me that this is required.
        tzury 16y ago
        dude, in some companies these days, you better off not mentioning MS WORD as an integral part of your toolbox. Want an impressive resume? Think latex! Want an even more impressive? Build up your resume and portfolio online.
      - quanticle 16y ago
        Yeah, but the MS Word format is vague enough, that the only way to ensure that someone else sees the same document you're seeing is to ensure that they're opening the document on the same version of Word, with the same OS and the same fonts that you have.
- DavidSJ 16y ago
  I never went to college. I submitted a PDF résumé. Amazon hired me.
- technomancy 16y ago
  > closed the tab when I found that they would only accept my r�sum� in MS Word format Why not just send it in a decent format and see what happens? Just because they say they'll reject it doesn't mean they will.
  - daeken 16y ago
    I did -- I initially just dropped it in there, then saw the ".doc only" notice after it errored out.
- jsolson 16y ago
  This is... odd. I started at Amazon in January, and as of November, plain text was the preferred format for resumes. Then again, mine got into the system through the employee referral program, so perhaps it takes different inputs.
- jontas 16y ago
  For what it's worth, their job site now says you paste your resume into a box: http://www.amazon.com/How-Apply-Help-Careers-Homepage/b/ref=amb_link_6001432_4?ie=UTF8&node=239370011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0CV8CN2Z0JZ599B2C4AR&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=434481001&pf_rd_i=203348011 http://www.amazon.com/How-Apply-Help-Careers-Homepage/b/ref=... I don't know about 6 months ago, perhaps their policy has changed.
mlinsey 16y ago
I was hired with no college degree, when Microsoft and Google would not even consider me on that basis. Also, for Amazon and other companies, there is a world of difference going through their public-facing recruiting process and getting to know someone on an interesting team through your network, and getting hired through them.
- zecho 16y ago
  I'm sure the same rules of networking apply anywhere, though, including Microsoft and Google. Degrees are an HR filter, but networking can bypass HR. So it goes.

petrilli 16y ago

I get the feeling that you're both right and wrong. Right in that a lot of the legacy Amazon code is probably burdened with huge technical debt. I also get the feeling they're pushing the boundaries in other areas. A bit of the "chase the shiny coin" syndrome. One of the issues is that none of us really know what goes on inside Amazon. They are notoriously secretive about most everything.

billswift 16y ago
"Secrecy is the beginning of stupidity." It both reduces feedback, often dramatically, and wastes your time and energy in maintaining the secrecy.
- TWADDLE 16y ago
  unless its APPL....
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Apple's ticker symbol is AAPL.
- neuroelectronic 16y ago
  Yes, because users always know exactly what they want and provide valuable feedback..

chrismealy 16y ago

Yegge left a long time ago.

pkteison 16y ago

I've seen some negative stories about working at Amazon. I don't recall seeing anybody write that it's a great place to program. Anybody have any stories or links about the upside?

jmelloy 16y ago
I know a lot of people who work/have worked there, and it seems to be a very love it or hate it company. They work people hard, but the people who like that kind of environment thrive. They seem to be pretty ruthless about improving in certain areas and are very metric-focused. I'm not sure it's a great place to program, but it's certainly a great place to learn about programming.
- technomancy 16y ago
  I've heard it is very dependent upon the team.
aphexairlines 16y ago
The upside is that the company has excellent developer tools and infrastructure (I mean aside from AWS), very accessible principal engineers, a huge amount of paying customers so your work has real impact, and it seems like most teams have autonomy to work and deliver in their own way. Within a week or two of joining I was given ownership of an important internal product while also getting up to speed on the main event (the retail website). The technical challenges are there for the taking. I also mentioned some of this at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488980 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2488980
- abeppu 16y ago
  The opportunity to have an impact cannot be overstated. I worked at A9, the search subsidiary of Amazon. Given that a substantial portion of purchases go through search, we were always keenly aware that even improvements that appeared to be modest could have very substantial impacts to the bottom line.

haberman 16y ago

I worked at Amazon from 2004-2007. On one hand, Amazon does some really excellent and novel work like Dynamo and AWS (S3, EC2, EBS, etc). They organize developer conferences and bring in really good people to lecture. They hire really solid distributed systems people like Pat Helland and give them reign to work with engineering teams to improve their designs. On the other hand, when you're in the trenches of a product team at Amazon, good engineering takes a back seat to features, deadlines, and keeping everything running. There was an incredible amount of pressure from the top to maintain high levels of service, but not a lot of support for taking the time to refactor or rework those systems to address the underlying causes of service disruption. Everything was always an emergency, but we always had to make the shallow fixes. Overall, I'm much happier at Google where there is a lot of support for good engineering at all levels of the organization, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

puredemo 16y ago
Too bad that Google doesn't touch the customer service standards at Amazon.
- VB6_Foreverr 16y ago
  I bought an xbox and a game for it at the same time from amazon. The xbox was fine the game disk was defective. I contacted amazon via my account, got a call from a human in less than a half hour (mainly I'd say to confirm the xbox itself was OK), received the new game a couple of days later and a refund of my return costs for the game itself. The only (very) slight quibble I'd have was that the postage on the return exceeded what they refunded. They made the return process itself simple by emailing me barcoded return labels and frequent reminders. I feel very confident buying off amazon a lot more so than ebay for example
chaddeshon 16y ago
Good engineering can't take a backseat to features, deadlines, and keeping things running. Good engineering IS features, deadlines, and keeping things running. If you aren't making features and meeting deadlines you aren't engineering anything. You're just messing around. Features and deadlines are the difference between science and engineering. There's never enough time, that's what makes it hard. Of course, Amazon might be pushing time tables too far. I have no idea, and it seems like you do.

tmarthal 16y ago

Maybe not working at Amazon, but their suite of companies are still technically innovating : their http://www.a2z.com http://www.a2z.com subsidiary is doing some amazing stuff, with top-tier talent.

dustinupdyke 16y ago

I don't see technical excellence having a lot to do with technical debt in terms of if you are excellent, you have little or no debt. Business needs change too quickly for a system as large as Amazon; they simply cannot maintain net zero technical debt and not cripple their reaction time in the market. The key is to know what level of debt is necessary and acceptable to take on and deal with going forward.

tybris 16y ago

I would say the opposite is true. Amazon is a collection of largely independent product teams that make their own decisions and share very little code. Infrastructure services are used based on its merit. Stuff that works stays, things that don't die out. Unlike most tech. companies that depend on large, common infrastructure, Amazon is carefully designed to evolve. Main problem is that a new family of species called AWS is so well-adapted and successful that its population is rapidly outgrowing some of the older, less dynamic species on which it depends. You can call that technical debt. I'd call it progress.

aphexairlines 16y ago

> 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product That was a long time ago. As Jeff Bezos confirms in the article, Amazon is a constellation of services now.

nika 16y ago

I worked at Amazon. Amazon is a company with a strong corporate culture, but this culture does not reflect reality. They talk about "door desks" and like to think they are a startup- but the door desks actually cost them more than if they bought regular office furniture. I can only speak of the areas where I worked, but none of the management, even at the lowest levels, was made up of engineers. My boss had his degree in criminal justice! He originally wanted to be a prison guard, but someone somehow got him a job at Amazon. His mentality was that of a prison guard, and by the time I left, he had driven away %60 of the engineers in our team from mistreatment. His boss (she wasn't an engineer either) backed him up and it was that way all the way up the chain of command. It is really hard to write software in an environment where the boss thinks all the employees are lazy, thinks that changing his mind all the time is ok, and that any delays this causes or complaints are insubordination. In fact, it was not uncommon for him to tell us to work on some system that was not part of our area, because he didn't understand how the software was structured. We had a big chunk of responsibility, but more than once he chewed us out for bugs that were in code handled by other groups! One of the other sayings is "B players hire C people, but A players hire A people". The hiring process is extremely arbitrary-- for instance the guy with a criminal justice degree was interviewing programmers and in order to get hired you had to get his thumbs up. The offices were way overcrowded. Probably four times the density of any of the startups I worked for (and about 8 times the density of Microsoft). I worked in a hall, and I was lucky. It was noisy and a high interruption environment. The pay is mediocre and they like to play games with your compensation, including promising things and then not delivering. As others have pointed out, the code base is a mess. The company is in the habit of rushing off in some direction and then dropping the project. For instance, they used to have movie listings and restaurant menus on their site. They also used to (or maybe still do) have a search engine. So they force code changes across the ecommerce codebase to support these things, and then, once the feature is launched the team is moved onto something else. When I left the restaurant menus and mail order catalogs were several years old. This produces a lot of cruft. As a result, they have a lot of engineers and a lot of engineer turnover. They have the same random changes in direction as any company. (I remember one thanksgiving we had to give up because Bezos changed his mind on thanksgiving eve about something we'd raised several weeks earlier and could have taken care of in plenty of time)... but since things are so poorly managed these changes in direction involve a lot of time and wasted effort. They hire a lot of H1B people. Good people and I enjoyed working with them, but this was one of the sources of engineer turnover. The poor treatment and poor environment generally meant that engineering projects were slow and expensive. This is why Amazon spends a lot on R&D. Not because they are really innovative. I think that probably %3 of their engineering effort is made up of really innovative engineers who are insulated enough to actually cut new ground. The rest of the workforce-- no matter how talented the engineers may be-- are hobbled by the code base and the extremely poor management structure. No question it was the worst company I've ever worked for-- and I've had some intense painful startup experiences. Amazon is a retailer that thinks it is an engineering company, led by people who don't know how, or don't care to, produce a good engineering environment. They really care about fulfillment and customer service, but they don't really care about their engineers and have no clue about how to be innovative (generally). But Bezos likes to go out and make pronouncements-- like a politician-- about how he cares about R&D and how critical engineering is, and all that kind of bunk.