How Amazon, Microsoft, and Google writes Future Proof Code

Part of being big tech is being future-proof

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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

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

Onboarding is a mess.

What’s really difficult working at these big companies is using technology that can’t be found anywhere else.