I know this sounds stupid but hear me out. I used to work as a developer at a non-tech company in the Midwest. I joined Amazon three years ago thinking that I was going to learn to write great software. The code here is atrocious. Rediculously bad. I used to get paid 60k and the code was 10000000x better than at Amazon. Guess what, Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the planet. I'm not really sure that the quality of code really matters to the value of the business. So if the quality of code doesn't really matter, that begs the following question: does the quality of engineers matter? Could a company perform just as well by targeting median (or even below median) developers as compared to hiring top talent? Let me know your thoughts. TC = 250k
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I heard the same about the Facebook codebase. I'm curious too.
Both have aggressive PIP cultures. These are the same companies where the number of lines of code you have written is considered as a metric for performance evaluations. Is it really that surprising that engineers at these companies push crappy code all the time?
I saw some pretty great code at Facebook. Best dev process I've ever seen too - their version of Phabricator coupled with a culture of small commits and well formed PRs. Code review and CI/CD was awesome.
Lol, you still think engineers are paid to write code. We aren't. If I just need coders I would outsource it Once you understand that the code is one of the least important part of your job the better off you will be.
Would like to hear more from you
engineers seem to be largely paid to fix other engineers’ code tbqh
Seems very specific to your team.
Untrue, I've been at a startup that has a large user base, as well as Apple and now in pp. Every team I've been on is business critical, customer facing and all of them are incredibly shit.
Lol PayPal, you just combatted his critique of using anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence
bingo. i also came from the midwest and always wondered why sv companies need so many people to do what we did with 1/10 as many. and now you know why that is.
Lol @ this post. First off, the code quality depends on the team and product. On my team the code quality bar is high and definitely trumps previous companies I’ve worked at. Also worth noting that the non-tech company in the Midwest probably doesn’t have as complex of requirements, or have to deal with the same scale. Code usually isn’t written like crap from the beginning, it gets that way as the product evolves and has to deal with issues. Sure you could argue that you should refactor often to address this, but you don’t always get the time to do so.
Look at this guy here with the only service that isn’t over-engineered as a promo project.
Down Jeff. Easy boy...
Fast moving companies that need to rapidly adapt to change will not care about codebase. It’s the story of every company that’s growing fast. SAAS companies may have it slightly better as they probably have less sprawl and limited vectors in which product rollout happens
Who has the time to write and maintain quality code. When the average tenure at Amazon is Onboarding -> Ops -> Ops -> Sev2 -> COE -> PIP
What are the acronyms?
You made me laugh today, Amazon, on an otherwise shitty day. Thank you.
In 3 years of being oncall at Google I was paged only once. That’s why
Because you have dedicated SRE’s.
That’s for production on call only. We have 3 other oncall rotations for devs in my team
Customers do not purchase or use your products based on quality of your codebase but based on the value they get from the platform.
You right but partially. if you keep your knife in the kitchen for long time without maintenance, it will get rust eventually. Code quality is important. If the company only cares about customers value ignoring other factors then guess what.. engineers will be there burned out digging 10 years old code to find that if statement so they can add another if statement. Then manager will say, you have spent a week for one line change? You're Piped!
"Customers do not purchase or use your car based on quality of your engine but based on the value they get from the platform" -Ford, probably. "Diners do not purchase or eat your food based on cleanliness of your kitchen but based on the satisfaction they get from the meal" - Angry Chef Guy or something You do know that 'the value they get from the platform' is determined almost exclusively by the behavior of the code, right? I'm always amused when managers say things like this because it shows they obviously have no idea how value is actually created for customers in this century.
Why do you think on-call sucks so much?
His point is still valid. Amazon is still #1 despite the oncall load for its engineers.
You can go to Amazon.