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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#331

Post by matai_kolila »

Zvez wrote: post #165
matai_kolila wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beauty doesn't put food on the table, is my point, and I'm beyond sick of working with people who put "code beauty" before "code usefulness". Ugly code that works pays bills. Beautiful code that doesn't work is, in a very literal sense, worthless. I'm not against writing clean code (there's utility in that), but I feel like some folks lose the plot and quit their jobs when they can't make "beautiful" things anymore,…

>Ugly code that works pays bills. Beautiful code that doesn't work is, in a very literal sense, worthless what about good code that work? All places where I see your argument prevail, ended up to be not just 'ugly code', but unmaintainable code. And systems that cannot evolve at all. Personally I don't call coding an art, but I've seen countless times how people people choose bad solution even though better one costs…

Don’t mistake “beautiful” code for “clean” code. Clean code has value in its ease of maintenance, it’s easy to work with. “Beautiful” code falls into the completely arbitrary land of “what is beautiful?”

Wars have been fought over defining beauty, but the important thing to note is that beauty is orthogonal to function. Clean code has clear criteria and value, beautiful code does not.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#332

Post by Firmwarrior »

nevon wrote: post #254
dimmke wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the pat answer Amazon gives to defend this absurd practice, but it breaks down really easily. >If your code breaks something, you should fix that code. Who else should? What if it wasn't my code, but code written by someone 3 years ago who quit because most people only work at the company for 2 years? And it's in a part of the codebase I've never touched. That's a much more likely scenario.

That's still your code ("your" meaning the team that owns the product). Who else would own it? The person that left 3 years ago?

The problem is that he has a big pile of half-working spaghetti code that he never has time to touch except when it malfunctions in the middle of the night

The problem behind that is that Amazon is a completely dysfunctional corporate hellscape. Like TFA said, you just don't have time or resources to actually fix things

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#333

Post by dimmke »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #332
nevon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still your code ("your" meaning the team that owns the product). Who else would own it? The person that left 3 years ago?

The problem is that he has a big pile of half-working spaghetti code that he never has time to touch except when it malfunctions in the middle of the night The problem behind that is that Amazon is a completely dysfunctional corporate hellscape. Like TFA said, you just don't have time or resources to actually fix things

Also usually it’s in Java in an internal framework based off Springboot and I’m a front-end developer with no experience writing backend services.

Totally normal. Not crazy at all. Take ownership.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#334

Post by jdeaton »

BurningFrog wrote: post #232
Patrol8394 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all look shining from the outside, problems start when you join the new team and realize the pile of s t you will be dealing with. Btw this happens in most companies, tons of tech debt. And those who created that s t are off onto new projects recreating the exact same mess all over again. It is a cycle that never ends. Only chance is to join early and be in for the long run.

If you're good at cleaning up "pile of shit" code, you will always have work! It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.

The problem is sometimes your organization does not reward these efforts at all.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#335

Post by skyyi »

olladecarne wrote: post #36

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…

>people are there for a paycheck

>adding a single line anywhere feels like playing Russian roulette

I worked at a company where all 4 founders were still there (15 years in) and that was very much our reality. I think the founders still cared, but that didn't matter - beyond a certain size (>100 employees), the majority of the people in the org didn't care the same way.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#336

Post by ezoe »

Let's face it. Most programing jobs are a bullshit job. I've been chasing obscure bugs for weeks and ended up fixing a few lines of code some guy wrote years ago and it improve the software so little. It's really difficult to keep the motivation besides the money.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#337

Post by hinkley »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #328
hinkley wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked a contract there and the team barely understood how some of those configuration panes functioned. It was always a case of staring at someone else's config and then at yours until you found enlightenment. And the target kept changing, so there was a very bad week where my computer worked for 80 minutes total. I coded like hell during that time, pair programmed with the other contractors or did math on a white…

Man, that's crazy. You can go to big boy jail for that, haha. When I quit Amazon, they ran to my desk and unplugged my dev machine, since they thought I was going to leave a software "time bomb". I thought that was the stupidest concern in the world, but maybe it does actually happen.

It was maybe his second gig. A lot of us are still little monsters at that point. Not to say that’s okay, but just to say I wasn’t that surprised. What I was surprised by was that I didn’t think he had that kind of animosity. Pretty good at hiding his feelings.

I never understood that “shut them out” reaction for people giving notice. Getting laid off, maybe. But I pick the time and place where I hand over my 2 weeks. I have all day or even a few days to do it, but I have known for a month or three that this was coming, I’ve known for days when it was likely to come, and I’ve known for hours or even days that it was happening today.

You don’t think if I was going to do something shitty that I would have done it first? You guys are really underestimating my intelligence, or at least my ability to plan. But then that’s probably part of why I’m leaving.

Also they say that liars think everyone else is lying, thieves think everyone else is stealing. So I wonder what this says about the paranoid person? Are they a danger to the company?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#339

Post by dimmke »

latchkey wrote: post #234
dimmke wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://jestjs.io/docs/configuration#coveragethreshold-objec... It is absolutely possible to set the coverage threshold in Jest to 100% for all categories and they are set to that in the codebase I worked on. I would spend hours trying to that last 0.02% covered sometimes.

The mythical portion of the number is that last 0.02%... the stuff that is just extra work for no logical benefit. It does make me wonder why it would take you hours to do that though... was the code that complicated to test for some reason?

Yes, it was. It used a very obscure language feature of JavaScript. I won't get more detailed than that.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#340

Post by hinkley »

olladecarne wrote: post #36

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…

I think you might have cause and effect mixed up a bit there. I’ve absolutely worked with people who left because they were unappreciated, and they were unappreciated because they wrote unmaintainable code and were defensive about it. Being a quitter and writing shitty code are very compatible personality traits.

To an extent then, if the original authors are still around, they were either appreciated or feared, but you probably won’t know which just from the interview. If they split it may be good riddance.

I do have a couple of mystery cases where I believe that someone who previously thought very highly of their own work had a change of heart, and realizing what they’ve done and how hard it would be to fix it, have decided it would be easier to start over someplace else. That may be true but I would recommend that it’s a character building exercise if you at least try to clean up your mess before leaving. There will be other messes, from other blind spots.

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