I've seen some negative stories about working at Amazon. I don't recall seeing anybody write that it's a great place to program. Anybody have any stories or links about the upside?
The upside is that the company has excellent developer tools and infrastructure (I mean aside from AWS), very accessible principal engineers, a huge amount of paying customers so your work has real impact, and it seems like most teams have autonomy to work and deliver in their own way. Within a week or two of joining I was given ownership of an important internal product while also getting up to speed on the main event (the retail website). The technical challenges are there for the taking.
The opportunity to have an impact cannot be overstated. I worked at A9, the search subsidiary of Amazon. Given that a substantial portion of purchases go through search, we were always keenly aware that even improvements that appeared to be modest could have very substantial impacts to the bottom line.
I know a lot of people who work/have worked there, and it seems to be a very love it or hate it company. They work people hard, but the people who like that kind of environment thrive. They seem to be pretty ruthless about improving in certain areas and are very metric-focused. I'm not sure it's a great place to program, but it's certainly a great place to learn about programming.
