Amazon Software Engineer (Software Developer II) reviews

3.4

60% would recommend to a friend

(337 total reviews)
avatar

Andrew Jassy

21% approve of CEO

56% positive business outlook

Software Engineer (Software Developer II) employees have rated Amazon with 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 337 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Engineer (Software Developer II) professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Engineer (Software Developer II) professionals compared to other employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

337 reviews
5.0
Aug 15, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great environment and team members. Challenging problems to solve and you get to own the entire end to end chain. some people see this as a burden I see it as valuable experience. Close to the city makes it very easy to access people and places. Work on problems that need to scale

Cons

Can be a little disorganized at times due to the sheer growth of the company but I think they are doing a good enough job considering.

2.0
Jul 22, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Smart people, some challenging computer science problems on _some_ teams. Growing stock

Cons

Unimpressive pay, heavy oncall/pager duty, unfair compensation structure, _NO_ perks compared to competitors. ZERO work life balance

3.0
Jul 7, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good comradely among the engineers. Very customer focused. You can pretty much kill any bad idea with "customers will hate it" argument. Agile program management means you'll keep up with what your team members are doing on a daily basis. Nearly everything is client/service architecture. Which if your team does it well, allows your to do whatever is best for your solution to your problem area without having huge migration issues with your clients. Generally managers are too busy to have those useless weekly meetings. (If you have daily ones why have a regular weekly one? You can always schedule a topic meeting to go over design issues etc.) Good and getting better support for bicycling to work. (bike cages, showers, lockers, and towels) Discount on buying stuff on their website.

Cons

On call. Nearly every engineering team has an on call rotation, so count the number of members and divide the number of days in a year by that number and that's the number of days you'll be on "house arrest" Because a page must be answered within 20 minutes any time day or night when you are on call. There seem to be more frameworks than teams. Everyone wants one and they tend to get imposed on your project in order to interface to some other needed service. Then the company drops support for it and you'll have to migrate your service. Difficult to do volunteer coding, ie help with your favorite freeware system, as you need approval from legal. It's not impossible but it's not straightforward either. Annual reviews tend to emphasis the negative vs the positive, that is you have peer feedback but your manager can pick and choose among the comments to either promote you or squash you. Very little opportunity to complain about it via HR.

Viewing 325 - 327 of 337 Reviews

Glassdoor has 250,583 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.