Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,158 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 209,158 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
Mar 29, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon is a well known, and well liked company -- they actually do care about customers -- and take customer trust and experience very seriously. Different groups and teams are reasonably decoupled, allowing a lot more independence. If you're the sort of person that likes to work on lots of different bits of software, and constantly jump from fire to fire, it's definitely a better fit than someone who prefers quality. Amazon also copes very well with the high-level of turn-over by making sure that exposing a lot of people to a lot of things -- to keep employees fungible.

Cons

Amazon makes no absolutely effort to attract high-quality people (in fact, they do quite the opposite with their self-claimed 'frugal' -- absolutely-under-no-circumstances-any-benefits policies). When Amazon tells you about 'Work Hard', what they mean is that they make work hard. Like all the stuff you're expecting: a powerful developer machine, or a second monitor, are things Amazon has a policy against (Although, as they will tell you -- you're allowed to buy and bring in your own stuff like RAM, SSDs and Extra-Monitors ... lucky you!). And what about Admin access on your developer laptop? LOL no, that would make life easy. To be approved for that, you need to be literally 4 levels up from the bottom! Root access on your Desktop? Nah, but they'll give you sudo, but you can't actually use your desktop for development -- you'll have to work through a VM. And to make sure you don't enjoy it, your development VM will be some ancient Red Hat image, with absolutely nothing newer than 5 years old (literally!). Just in case you ever want to google something, all the libraries/function/features made in the last half-decade won't work. The internal systems at Amazon are so painful, that I suspect that a large percentage of employees after a hard-days work, come home and put needles in their arms for fun. When stuff works, its slow and largely unusable, and a dozen times worse than any freeware you'll find on the internet. The source control, build systems and all other developer tools seem like it was developed by a retarded monkey after he drank too much that night. Apparently they're now working on an "internal github, that works on more SCS than just git -- and has an awesome advanced security model". I wonder why they don't try get their page-load times under 10 seconds first. Even things that you thought were solved 20 years ago, Amazon manages to break with their own special flavor of retardedness. Like the mailing lists. It's an accepted fact, that it's impossible to *reliably* filter a message to a folder, because the send is not from the mailing list -- there is no mailing list header, and no required subject prefix! Another great joy is, after sending a message to a mailing list, your inbox will lag for *literally* the next 5 minutes, as you get spammed by "Out of Office" replies. But no one excepts the Amazon workplace to be functional or enjoyable, so this is just the normal. And of course, then there's the bureaucracy. At first, you'll try fight it, and try do what's best for the company. But soon you'll realize, like half the company is nothing but paper-pushers -- and you can easily waste a month just trying to get approval for some trivial thing. In the end, you'll be a lot happier here if you treat it as a job, don't try fight it, don't try enjoy it, put in your hours and leave at the end of the day (hoping your pager doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night, over some stupid issue)

1.0
Jun 11, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Some great people work for the company.

Cons

Sweatshop. Very poor employee morale. Most employees I know are very dissatisfied with their compensation, the poor raises (range = 0-3%, 5% is practically unheard of), high healthcare costs, and lack of career development opportunities (i.e. promotions are rare and there's no clear path to getting promoted ... most promotions require lots of political maneuvering). And the continuous change of focus, priorities and resources whenever the CEO comes up with a new idea (aka a "Jeff project" that will make your project no longer a priority) proves disheartening to everybody at some point in their Amazon career. This culture all comes directly from the CEO and nothing will change until he changes.

2.0
Mar 21, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon's brand name on your resume Opportunity to work on some interesting challenges Talented & smart folks around One of the Best Stocks

Cons

Amazon is a huge company & perhaps this experience is something that many current amazonians might not necessarily agree with. It's like there are so many startups within the Amazon universe & everyone would have a completely different experience altogether. But for the most part, I think that the BIE role won't differ much at least from the learning curve offered by the position. Now, the org that I was a part of - Customer Trust & Partner Support org at Amazon isn't a great team to be a part of at least in my opinion. At the face of it, people would be helpful, however, it's a different story over what they are thinking about you in their mind. Blame game would run deep down & most if not all the folks are burnt out to a point where working over the weekend as well as 10 hours/day is the norm, the worst part is no one wants to acknowledge this as they feel that this is the only way through. Managers just have 1:1 for the sake of it & if by chance you get into a position where you have to offer them a perspective which is different from what they would like to hear then oftentimes it turns out to be an argument when in reality you were just trying to make them understand your perspective. The result of this useless 1:1 would typically be along the lines of your manager repetitively saying "I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done" (these are the actual quotes used in the conversation). Almost everyone wants to draw a red line on the white drawing board whilst holding a green marker in their hand. If someone acknowledges how burnt out they are it's not only ignored but also you tend to be in the bad books of your hiring manager. In my humble opinion, a Business Intelligence Engineer at any organization is responsible for churning out actionable insights from the raw data as opposed to being a data vending machine who more often than not serve as PM's personal calculator whilst working on some archaic code/tools available. For the most part, you would just leverage the existing legacy code & make some modifications to the WHERE clause of the SQL code for the Adhoc requests that float in every now & then. The PMs aren't adept to do something as simple as pivoting the data in MS EXCEL. If you get an appreciation email from your customer, then instead of acknowledging it in the email & applauding you in your team meeting, your manager would ask you some preposterous question whether you adhered to the so-called team policies & had your code verified (doesn't matter if the other person has any context around the report/doesn't have the bandwidth to do so). Tools that you would work for the most part are SQL (just modifying the filters of the query), datanet (a legacy ETL tool) & Quicksight(Amazon's version of Looker + Tableau combined). If you try to ask some intelligent questions to your business stakeholders to understand the business problem in depth then again you would fall in their bad books because you are asking too many questions. You are expected to know everything & anything about the data even if it's not reliable/doesn't have a single source of truth or you haven't worked on that data/report earlier or they have half knowledge about things(which again is far more dangerous than not knowing things at all). Bias for action as a leadership principle is been modified every now & then by everyone across the board so that they can taint/defame other folks for a fault of their own. The first step in solving a problem is realizing there is one & it doesn't seem to me that folks at CTPS org(especially the higher management) are a huge fan of that. Managers are just interested in impressing their higher-ups & then if for some reason they can't do that then the only person to be blamed would be the BIEs like me. To shed some light on that, they would just like to show them the data which would present one side of the coin & impress the higher-ups, something along the lines of saying there has been a 50% increase in the employee-count when in reality you just 1 employee & added 1 employee. Perhaps, this explains why there was a huge restructuring in the senior management as well as at the analyst level where people were just fed up with what they were going through. If your customer is on a personal vacation & you need some clarification from them for a report that you are working for them, then it's on you if the report isn't delivered on the agreed-upon date. Too many redundant business processes which just doesn't take you anywhere & guess what response you get when you bring that up in your 1:1- you guessed it right, 'I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done'. I was so burnt out that I used to practically work 50-60 hours every week including the weekend with no words of encouragement/acknowledgment about it. Now when I look back in time, I think I was naive to care too much for my work, not having a WLB, ignoring all of this & just focusing on my work right from the 2nd week I joined Amazon when my offer letter clearly stated: "you have been compensated for all the hours worked". As a BIE, don't be surprised if you just use MS EXCEL extensively so much so that the WBR reporting is simply done by running an ETL job involving SQL script, downloading the excel file extending the fill-handle & filling in the numbers manually every week. (It might have changed now ). If you tell your customer that this metric doesn't make sense for a particular report backed by the right data then the feedback you get would be to learn & be curious, have a bias for action & customer obsession & again you guessed it right "I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done".

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