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When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The i
by AlchemistCamp 3y ago
When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup).
I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.
- gardenhedge 3y agoHow was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?
- AlchemistCamp 3y agoIt was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago. When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK. I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.