Jumping ship

Since I started at Amazon, lots of new people have come in since the company is growing dramatically, but also a lot of old timers have taken off. Most notably, software engineers. Unlike other local technology companies such as Microsoft and Real Network, which are software companies to start, Amazon is trying to transform from a retailer to a software company. It's not a easy transition to say the least. Amazon typically acts like a company that has a really REALLY big IT department, not a engineering organization.

A lot of my friends who are SDEs (software development engineer) are leaving or thinking about leaving. It's usually due to better offer, but most of them are simply burnt out. Amazon uses Scrum as its default agile development model, and that could be tiring all by itself, but since Amazon doesn't have a separate operation team from a development team for most of its core system, the SDEs end up having to maintain and upkeep an 24/7 mission critical system while trying to develop the new version. Many of the SDEs take turns wearing pagers to respond to high severity errors 24/7. It's quite draining.

We are still too much of a hacker organization. We rarely buy third-party software, because we think we could literally build everything we need. It's excited for the geek in me, but thinking as a business owner, it's a scary way of doing things.