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How Amazon, Microsoft, and Google writes Future Proof Code
Part of being big tech is being future-proof
Introduction
My name is Alex Nguyen and I’ve had the chance to job hop between multiple opportunities in big tech such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
I onboarded more than I would like to admit but I did notice that all these big companies wrote code very similarly.
To get an idea of how much I struggled as an engineer:
My first code review at Amazon had 22 comments.
My first pull request at Microsoft had 36 comments.
My first change log at Google had 27 comments.
Before we talk about what makes writing code at these companies different, let’s first talk about the poor practices these companies have.
Issues writing code at big companies
Onboarding is a mess.
What’s really difficult working at these big companies is using technology that can’t be found anywhere else.
Everyone knows JIRA, but have you ever heard of Google’s Buganizer? Or Amazon SIMs? Learning these technologies slows down new engineers.
Internal Stackoverflow.
Start ups like the one I’m building at Squarenote.io have people use information that’s public on the internet.
But bigger companies have such niche problems that you can only have them answered by internal engineers who “might” know the answer.
Money comes first.
If the feature isn’t something that makes money, then the code isn’t going to be cared for.
Think about how much tech debt keeps piling up for every other feature except the one you’re working on. Have you noticed Amazon’s refund and cancel page still looks like it’s from the 2000's?
That’s because the tech debt to fix it is so bad nobody cares to work on it.
