zlacker

Having worked there as well and recently left, I'm super surprised as well to see them considered with the likes of Google or Facebook, etc.

Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit.

Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.

I can go on and on. But generally the place is ran like it's a sales company primarily. Not an engineering company.

Amazon has a cancer through out it. It's basically a shitty copy of Microsoft without any of the virtues..but all the vices.

Not to mention, it says a lot that they have no perks except "free tea." 12 Leadership principles, which are dumb shit like "Be curious", "Have instinct."

Amazon doesn't have the brightest or the best - they have sheep that get tangled in the middle, or assholes that somehow become management. The company is only surviving because it set its margins so low that no one else could compete.

But now market leaders are sprouting out. Chewy.com for pet food. Walmart.com for general goods. Drugstore.com / Soap.com / Walgreens.com, the list goes on.

With such a shitty internal culture, Amazon will fall. I will have a shit-eating grin when that happens.

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Amazon Web Services was their saving grace. But having seen internally how each team has different practices, different tech..some that are arcane and esoteric. Theres no cohesion. Even the CSS for Amazon, theres no sheet that is shared. Each team has to hard-rip the colors and whatnot from other projects like the retail site.

Makes me totally re-evaluate AWS after seeing how its built internally.

The charm of AWS is that every service in that goddamn console looks like its a polished part of a pyramid of engineering sanctity.

Heh, wrong. Each service...written by a different team, with totally different methods, totally different tech. Some teams even use .NET and IIS... You can probably probe the endpoints to some of these services and maybe see it externally. But well, take my word for it.

Once a team has a decent AWS project, they slap together a new logo. Make the UI blend with the existing panel. And then scale it using existing AWS services. But it still is a hydra of mismatched code.

The whole thing is a frankenturd - they did a good job with the design, ui, and IAM policies to make these services look like they are all part of the same cohesive development. But it simply isn't the case. AWS is patched together like a paranoid android on the inside.

>>golden+(OP)
Out of curiosity, what team did you work on?

>>umanwi+H
Sorry, I do not feel like divulging that kind of information. I've actually probably said too much in my above post.

>>golden+(OP)
If AWS is so shitty on the inside, why aren't the blogs filled with stories about bugs etc after the enormous amount of use it gets ?

>>petra+Q2
I suspect only EC2/S3 and their paired services (EBS, IAM, etc) gain enough use to qualify as "enormous" and thus receive wide attention for their failings. AWS has a lot of services:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#List_of_pr...

Putting that aside, I'm not sure "why aren't people complaining?" is a reasonable way to prove or disprove how buggy software is.

>>golden+(OP)
> Makes me totally re-evaluate AWS after seeing how its built internally.

Customers care about deliverables, not elegance.

>>rodger+J4
I'm pretty sure Atlassian (recently IPOed) proved that to be wrong, especially in the case when your customers are developers.

Besides, bad repetitive code almost always results in bugs. If there were a ten commandments of programming, that would be #1.

>>golden+(OP)
Why should anyone care about consistency in how AWS is put together?

>>golden+T4
The JIRA source code is available when you buy a license and it is not the pinnacle of good engineering. It is textbook Java enterprise beans gibberish engineering.

>>dgemm+26
The same reason you should care about consistency of the way the car you drive is put together. If you use a utility, you don't want things going wrong when your life or business depends on it.