Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,088 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

50% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Amazon has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 209,088 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amazon employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

209K reviews
1.0
Aug 16, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Awesome customer focus - you'll learn what customer focus really means, instead of the half-hearted stuff you see in most other companies. * If you're an adrenalin junkie, who always likes to be on edge, racing against the clock in an imaginary race, you'll like it here. DISCLAIMER: You'll get tired of it pretty soon though.

Cons

* This place scars you for life. Read more at the end of this section. * Forget your life, health and everything else if you want to be successful here. To the company, you're just a resource to be used till you're all used up and then discarded. That, they say, is the price of success. * If you're someone who likes your 7 hours of sleep a day, stay away. * If you're someone who has hobbies that take more than a few seconds of your time, stay away. * If you're someone who has a family that you'd like to spend more than a few seconds of a day with, stay away. * If you have friends who you want to talk to more than once a year, stay away. * If you're smart, stay away - you can land a job at a much better work place. The work here isn't technically challenging at all; it is challenging in the sense that you're woken up in the middle of the night and have to fix things however you can, however quickly you can, so that you can be in to work the next day. * If you think you'll learn how to write good code or design complex systems, think again - you're just going to fight fires and write hacky code to quickly patch up someone else's mess. The aim is just speed and secondly, something that works somehow, and the end result is an unprofessional and messy codebase, which even the worst coders in my class in college would've been ashamed of. * Their oncall system is probably the worst. A NOTE TO THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO JOIN AMAZON, OR THOSE WHO RECENTLY JOINED: * If you can turn down your offer and continue interviewing elsewhere, I'd suggest doing that. * If you've got no other option, or if you've recently joined, give it a few months; don't assume things will improve - they never do. My first month was an excellent representation of the other 22 months I stayed there. * Keep coding on the side to keep up your design skills. I personally know so many people who were scared to interview at other places, since they felt they'd lost all skills. If you feel the same way, don't worry - some open source coding is good enough to bring you up to scratch. * Don't let their ridiculous stock vesting cycle trap you! You'll lose most of your stocks whenever you leave. * If you realize you're starting to have more headaches, or your blood pressure is beginning to get higher, or if you face any health issues whatsoever, just put in your papers. Those are the first symptoms that things are beginning to go downhill. The adrenalin junkie lifestyle is not for everyone and there's no shame in quitting. * This place scars you for life. I'm still suffering the after-effects, almost 3 years after I've left, and my health is slowly improving (thankfully) now. It also changes your mindset and how you react to things that are normal at a workplace. Less than two years there, and my instinctive reaction to a problem at work has become figuring out a hack; just focus on the extremely short-term and forget about the medium and long-terms. I've also realized I now had trust issues at work. I initially looked at teammates in my new workplace (one of the best companies to work for) as potential backstabbers. I could go on and on, but long story short - STAY AWAY! You do NOT want to ever work here. Unless you don't appreciate your current employer - in which case, go work for Amazon for a year and return to your old workplace. After working for Amazon, anywhere else will seem like heaven!

1.0
Apr 25, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can bring your dog to work. Sadly that is the only good thing I can say about this company. You may meet some smart and amazing people, but not at the upper management level.

Cons

Please keep in mind this review comes from the viewpoint of a Brand Specialist. I can't speak for the software developers, those in other segments outside of the Amazon.com retail business (for example Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services, or company subsidiaries), or those not in the corporate HQ in Seattle (such as fulfillment center associates). - Zero work/life balance. Everyone is expected to take their work home. Management pretends to care and tells you to not overwork, but if you don't work weekends you'll get fired. I've received a phone call at 4 AM from work. Insane infringement on your personal life. - The culture is toxic. On average people quit after just two years. That isn't normal for any company. It's a revolving door. After just one year of employment, half my team was already junior to me. People either quit or get fired. Everyone is afraid of getting fired and discuss it frequently when management isn't around. It's really sad. - The company is incredibly disorganized, the work day is chaotic. There is an appalling lack of training, people don't know how to do their jobs and are being taught by others who have only been with the company for a grand total of 3 months. The tools you need to do your job are poorly developed and often break down or have limited usefulness, leading to unnecessary low productivity which you are blamed for. Systems are constantly changing and no one knows how to use the new versions - some people like this because they want innovation, but the truth is the company is so large now that you really don't have much freedom to innovate. There is a huge clash between a start-up mentality and a bureaucratic corporate culture. - Management is poor quality, and downright nasty. Many are not qualified to do their job, lacking proper experience. For instance, some were on a management rotational program that put them in 3 very different roles over 3 short years, while they had no background in any of those functions. It was a joke working under those types because they knew just as much about their job as you did. I witnessed senior managers being brought into the company and being "trained" by their reports. Upper level management is completely inhumane - they treat people like machines / slaves / farm animals, despite that many of my peers were incredibly bright and talented people from strong backgrounds and with good educations (Ivy leagues and other Top 25 schools). Management never recognized people for their contributions and hard work, leading to low morale. In summary, I'd say that the high employee turnover is evidence enough of the lack of work/life balance and the toxic and chaotic work environment perpetuated by bad management. As I mentioned above, after just one year, I was already more senior than half my team. Everyone I had known was gone, and I was training the newcomers. Think about that.

1.0
May 29, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Not much OT, salary is paid on time

Cons

This role is essentially a call centre role that is disguised as a "specialist" role. No part of the job description says that it is a call centre role. The culture here is as toxic as hell. You will be on your chair from 830-530 with only 2 x 15 mins break + 1h lunch break. If you exceed your break by even 1 minute, you're expected to explain why to your manager. Personal time aka toilet time is capped at 20 minutes a week. If you do the math, that is 4 min/day you're allowed to step away from your workstation to visit the toilet/answer phone calls. Is this even humane? The job itself is pretty redundant and full of lies. You're expected to lie to the sellers you're talking to on the phone that you have 0 visibility on the situation. In actual fact, there is 100% visibility just that you are not allowed to share any info with the seller. If you're caught sharing, you will be in what they call "The Sharing Box" which is basically a sabo box where specialists sabo each other so that they get recognised. The turnover rate is super high which says a lot about the organisation, hence they are mass hiring just to replace those that have left. There is also little to no career progression. They are intending to hire a lot of specialists in the thereabouts of 300 so you'd need to compete with 300 other specialists for promotion.

Viewing 61 - 63 of 209,088 Reviews

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