Where are the engineers? - SDE2 Abebooks Employee Review

1.0
May 8, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- High pay for Victoria. - You get to pretend like you work at Amazon on your resume.

Cons

- You have to go on-call and put your life on hold every few weeks. - No engineering culture to speak of. Everybody's too busy putting out fires. Or they're rushing features out the door to compensate for the shame of working on such terrible code. - 20 years of accumulated legacy code with no plan to deal with it. - New code is anything goes, whatever a coop or a junior engineer wants! - Managers are just going through the motions blindly. They carry on like nothing's wrong while the building is actually on fire. - The site looks second rate and has been moving forward at a snail's pace for the past 10 years. Look in the wayback machine. - Have a look at any of the HTML. People can't even be bothered making sure it's well formed. Now try using the site. You'll see all sorts of inconsistent web design styles from throughout the past 20 years. Now imagine what the code behind this must look like. - Pay starts high but quickly flattens out. You'll be stuck in a city with few other tech jobs. - Amazon leadership principles are the basis for a cult.

Explore other reviews about Abebooks

5.0
Apr 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

good work balance good people

Cons

a lot of time need to communicate

4.0
Feb 22, 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

AbeBooks is full of smart people across the tech and business sides of the company and working with them is fun and challenging. As an Amazon subsidiary, we have access to one of the world's most impressive companies for knowledge sharing, training, and career opportunities. RSU compensation is unbeatable in the Victoria job market.

Cons

Limited resources. Like most companies, there is an endless list of things we want to do. Getting the resources to get them done can be a challenge but we have great processes in place to help us prioritize projects and get as much done as possible with the resources we have. Getting creative and bit scrappy to get things out the door can be a fun challenge.

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