3 ms·
Do you feel that you want to be a career developer or do you think you'd prefer starting up somewhere? If you think you want to be a career guy, go with Micros
by icey 18y ago
Do you feel that you want to be a career developer or do you think you'd prefer starting up somewhere?
If you think you want to be a career guy, go with Microsoft; it's golden on any resume and it has the benefit of treating its employees very well.
If you think you want to be a startup guy, I'd say that you hear about many more people doing startups with Amazon in their past than Microsoft. Plus, Amazon is an expert in the efficiency game - they know what technologies can get the job done, and being exposed to that culture is great for forming the startup mentality.
- futureintern 18y agoYou've covered most of the things I like about the two companies. I don't want to be "just" a developer long term for the sake of the work itself, but the stability of MSFT is nice (which is not to say that Amazon isn't stable). Ideally I'd like to save enough to have the ability to do less stable things down the line.
- futureintern 18y agoOn reflection (too late to edit it), that makes it sound like I'm leaning towards MSFT. I guess maybe I am. But I really admire the energy and efficiency of Amazon, as well as the innovation. I can't imagine MSFT ever launching something like Mechanical Turk, or any of the AWS stuff...I know they launched some me too stuff after Amazon, but that's not the same as being the first to do it.
- icey 18y agoI don't know if this helps you or not; but I know 4 MSFT employees and 3 of them are pretty sure they are going to retire from there. All three I know from my days consulting. The fourth I met while he was at Microsoft, and he gets to work on interesting things; I just don't know him well enough to ask him if he plans on being there for awhile. MSFT does have interesting projects going on as well. The R&D wing has its fingers in some pretty cool stuff like Surface and Photosynth.
- elq 18y agoone of the reasons you hear about more amazon folks in starups vs. MS is that MS generally treats developers very well so they tend to stay around. Amazon is not such a great company to work for, at least according to the people I know that "did time" there.
- futureintern 18y agoThanks - that's the kind of thing I was hoping to find out. Could you elaborate a bit on why people didn't like being at Amazon?
- elq 18y agothe general theme was amazon is cheap - cheap computers, cheap office space (poor ventilation, uncomfy chairs etc), long hours, a large amount of pager duty (1 week/month not uncommon), relatively poor pay, etc