How are your company's internal tools?
Amazon seems to have an internal tool for everything. Pastebin, build system, JIRA, Code Review software, etc are all built in-house. This got me thinking about the internal infrastructure of other companies and how far they'll go to avoid relying on third-party software. How do you like yours? Any really innovative solutions to everyday problems?
Lockheed has a timecard system that has just been updated after 10-15 years of the old one. The updated one still looks like it’s 5-10 year old technology. It’s just a website. They haven’t bothered to hire anyone who knows JavaScript to make this better.
like a timesheet? ugh
A lot of those were built over years and years, or started with a commercial solution and were replaced with something custom when they couldn’t scale further. I suspect most smaller or newer companies can’t (or shouldn’t) invest in building a lot of what you see at Amazon until they are 1) successful in the market and 2) hit bottlenecks due to those internal systems. Until then, they can/should use commercial systems.
Honest to god, the word scale is thrown at every situation that it doesnt really makes sense. Jira is used at boeing and it scales just fine... why is Amazon any different? Gitlab was used at Boeing and that scaled just fine to, why are we forced into using controved pipelines and code.amazon.com. Maven, npm,... etc... is the dependency manager for the internet, so why are we internally forced to use this weird monolithic soa version set thing?
Tektronix offers a wonderful asset management tool. It helps with accounting costs, keeping track of hardware, lifecycle, you name it!
Lol
We rely on third party software for pretty much everything. No point trying to reinvent the bicycle on systems that are not our core business. On the other hand, we use our own incident management system and I believe it's the best in the market.
I used to be at Microsoft and Amazon. Amazon has better internaltools than Microsoft. But Facebook has much better tools than Amazon
I've worked at Amazon and Microsoft. In my view Microsoft has better tools than Amazon. Also Microsoft uses the same products internally as the ones used by customers externally. Amazon internal tooling is good but huge learning curve with little to none working documentation. You have to figure out and look for someone who would navigate you through the complex tools. Given Amazon culture this is a hard thing to find generally tough you might get lucky and find someone willing to help you
My complaint about Microsoft tools is that it varies from team to team. Amazon and Facebook are more consistent across the company
When was the last time you worked at ms? From my experience the whole company is trying to move to standard tools. It is not a completed effort still ongoing One example: when I was working in office, they were using perforce which sucked. They had started migrating towards vso. Next team everything was on vso which was amazing Again my personal experience
Yes and we sell a lot of them to third parties.