Having worked there as well and recently left, I&#x27;m super surprised as well to see them considered with the likes of Google or Facebook, etc.<p>Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit.<p>Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.<p>I can go on and on. But generally the place is ran like it&#x27;s a sales company primarily. Not an engineering company.<p>Amazon has a cancer through out it. It&#x27;s basically a shitty copy of Microsoft without any of the virtues..but all the vices.<p>Not to mention, it says a lot that they have no perks except &quot;free tea.&quot; 12 Leadership principles, which are dumb shit like &quot;Be curious&quot;, &quot;Have instinct.&quot;<p>Amazon doesn&#x27;t have the brightest or the best - they have sheep that get tangled in the middle, or assholes that somehow become management. The company is only surviving because it set its margins so low that no one else could compete.<p>But now market leaders are sprouting out. Chewy.com for pet food. Walmart.com for general goods. Drugstore.com &#x2F; Soap.com &#x2F; Walgreens.com, the list goes on.<p>With such a shitty internal culture, Amazon will fall. I will have a shit-eating grin when that happens.<p>---------------------------<p>Amazon Web Services was their saving grace. But having seen internally how each team has different practices, different tech..some that are arcane and esoteric. Theres no cohesion. Even the CSS for Amazon, theres no sheet that is shared. Each team has to hard-rip the colors and whatnot from other projects like the retail site.<p>Makes me totally re-evaluate AWS after seeing how its built internally.<p>The charm of AWS is that every service in that goddamn console looks like its a polished part of a pyramid of engineering sanctity.<p>Heh, wrong. Each service...written by a different team, with totally different methods, totally different tech. Some teams even use .NET and IIS... You can probably probe the endpoints to some of these services and maybe see it externally. But well, take my word for it.<p>Once a team has a decent AWS project, they slap together a new logo. Make the UI blend with the existing panel. And then scale it using existing AWS services. But it still is a hydra of mismatched code.<p>The whole thing is a frankenturd - they did a good job with the design, ui, and IAM policies to make these services look like they are all part of the same cohesive development. But it simply isn&#x27;t the case. AWS is patched together like a paranoid android on the inside.