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Comment by pacifi30 | Hacker News Reader

The thing here is not about if Microsoft let their developers use all the new shiny technology but the point to stress here is how much percentage everyday does a developer at MS actually codes, I bet it wont be more than 20%.

I am so sure of this because being at Amazon since April last year, I havent coded more then 700 lines of code, bulk of which was supporting new features in the already behemoth software.

I always wanted to work for a big company and I was super happy when I finally got a job offer but lately I have realized that the biggest downside of working for a big company is that you dont code, you just add features in to all the in use product, attend meeting and specific for Amazon, be on the pager 24X7.

For all you guys coming fresh out of colleges, head to bay area and join a start up, ditch these big companies.

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That bad at Amazon? I've been at Google for a little over 2 years and have written about 160,000 lines of code for them. (And deleted about 30,000.)

Seems like a lot more than I expected, but just looking through my recent commit history, I wrote 830 lines of code just last week on my 20% project alone, so 1600 lines/week doesn't seem that unreasonable. And here I've been complaining about how I never have time to get any work done...

I just had my two year anniversary at Amazon. I've written many more than 700 lines but I bet less than 160K. And yes, deleting code is the best.

I don't know the GP but their post is believable. Some parts of Amazon are mired in cross-team dependencies. Worse, to get anything done in those situations, hacks have been piled on top of hacks for tragic years. The right solution may be waiting in the wings but all the dominoes have to fall first.

There is a lot of variety at Amazon. There are high-pressure, high-reward teams like Kindle. There is cutting edge stuff at AWS and elsewhere.

My team is a leaf far out on the dependency tree. Approximately, we have only end users. It's a great situation, even with a pager (shared between five people, so one week or less a month). Our pager, on the average, does not go off. We get to ship software every week and we're profitable.

My experience at Amazon so far (since last June) is definitely better than pacifi30's. I've been writing a lot of software (for both existing and new projects), the dev infrastructure is great, dev tool teams are very responsive and always improving our workflow, and the end result (mobile in my case) is fulfilling.

That sucks for you. I've been working at Microsoft for about 4 years. First 2 years as a tester, and the latter 2 years as a dev (still a dev). When I was a tester, I coded 4 days a week with 1 day a week for other investigations (live site issues, meetings, etc.) As a dev, the ratio haven't changed. I still code at least 4 days a week (80% of the time) with 1 day a week for meetings, investigations, documentations, etc. We have a separate operations team that carries pagers. They will do their investigation before I get called. For past 6 months, I got called once. Just in case you are wondering, I work under the Windows Live org.

When I was a tester, I coded 4 days a week

I'm sorry, but what's the difference between a tester and a developer then?

I suspect the type of code you write. As a dev I'd expect you to write code that ships to customers. As a tester you write test code and harnesses. Stuff the customer never directly sees.

I think I can honestly say that at ever company I've run or been a manager of influence we've had more lines of test code than product code. Yet I'm still surprised when people say "testers code?"

I joined just a little after you and my experience has been very positive. Feel free to talk to me (danielsi@) anytime you want to talk about the dev process in the company or our teams.

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