Amazon reviews

* Software Development Managers are hit and miss. Only some people are truly great and iconic (I am lucky to work for one, but that's last 3 years out of 7). Amazon figured out how to hire engineers well, but they seem to not do such a good job with managers. They do get the training, so over time some get better. If they want to. * Despite the number of truly smart engineers and hackers in the best sense of the word, there are a lot of folks who got CS degree & basic experience but require oversight, mentoring and time to grow. This ratio is not favorable for more experienced SDE2/3 engineers (there are teams who are exceptions to this). * Business management is hit or miss. Predominantly male and bro (I am male too), often falling into alpha-male mode of decision making, occasionally attracting poor actors who throw an entire organization into a doomsday project for a couple of years, claim the delivery, get their bonus, and then move to, say, AWS with no consequences when the product quietly flops and dies 1-2 years later. Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea of "failing fast" and trying new things, but it pains me to see when potentially good ideas are implemented haphazardly, without proper UX upfront work, without talking to prospective end customers, using a ton of cowboy coders and poor design (both UX and technical). Sometimes Amazon gets so lucky that the customers like their product despite the poor initial quality, giving the company enough time to improve it. It shows from the customer perspective, Amazon seems to be perpetually in the niche of "this is not Apple, but convenient enough for me to use it until somebody else makes a better version of this product". * Software is pretty poor on the low level. There are a few brilliantly designed systems, but the rest is a mess of startup-like code, half of which is deprecated and is written to meet short term business goals. SOA architecture but interactions between services are not thought through. Not many engineers know the big picture from tech and business standpoint. There is a constant pressure on the business (which directly translates to engineers) to take shortcuts and ship fast, because everyone else does. To give credit to Amazon, they tend to go through multi-year phases of chaotic expanding and then cleaning up, but it comes at the cost of engineers surviving through supporting (oncall) the crappy systems and having no resources (or knowledge) to fix them after the business finally says "ok, now we are truly losing money and people on this, let's fix it up please?" I am oncall this week and I was up till 5AM fixing things on Saturday night, only to hit the wall when another system didn't do what I expected. Neither of 3 other people from other related systems and respective support teams which I contacted knew which action need to be taken and whose system should be responsible for fixing the issue. As I said, in my experience only few engineers have deep understanding of the systems they own. The rest are struggling with crappy code, poor/no documentation (Amazon SDE/SDMs are kind of perversely proud of not documenting things) and passing the buck until they hit the person who knows the answer expected from them. * Lots of internal software which is built poorly where an open-source system would be better. "Not invented here" syndrome. There is no excuse for that, because improving / scaling up the open-source systems would be less costly than building poor internal clones. And better for the rest of the world. Bottom line - if you come to work here, you need to have integrity as an SDE or SDM. You need to be a self-starter and probably a bit workaholic. You need to be opinionated and confident enough to voice concerns and propose ideas, but also a good listener and open to ideas of others. You need to own your projects and be willing to drive them, be the squeaky wheel and demand that things are done in a long-term sustainable way. If you get a good and supportive manager, and smart business people, you will make things better. If you are an experienced engineer and plan on only following what you are told to do by your boss, please go somewhere else. If you are a beginner SDE - you will learn, but be prepared to take ownership for advancing your career, putting extra time outside of work to learn new things and not rely on your manager for it (because chances are, your manager won't do it very well). Be prepared to understand the agreements you sign, especially the part which says that Amazon can claim anything you code, design or ideate, even outside of workplace.

First I'll say that there is not a strong company culture so the experience can vary greatly depending on the Senior leadership team of each site. My experience is from OAK4 which is literally the worst FC in the company to work (based on employee surveys). Firstly, job specific training was virtually non-existent. The first week of training is geared at showing you each part of the operations from the associate's perspective. You will spend time actually doing each of the repetitive tasks that associates do every day. The second week is leadership training but not for your specific role. They just go over things like how to log on to VPN, company videos and where to find certain resources. After that the experience can vary. I showed up to my site with no welcome and told to follow certain people for extended periods of time. There was no circling back or review of learnings, it was literally follow this person and pick up what you can. There was not a big investment made. Many said it's because turnover is so high, but I would argue the reverse; that turnover is so high because of the lack of investment. While the pay is good, the 2-year bonus is there so that you have to aggressively try to move up. There really isn't a place for someone that doesn't want to get promoted. So keep it to yourself if that is your reality. Trust very few people, and work to parlay it into a better opportunity within the first two years would be my advise. After two years when the bonus runs out it won't be worth it. Get your first vest and be ready to move on. The 4 day schedule can change quickly and fairly often with little notice. Some sites rotate it regularly on a schedule, and some just change it based on needs. Most sites do front half (Sun-Wed) and back half (Wed-Sat) days and nights. A lot of people don't like nights and most don't like back half, but with both of those the crazy goes away a bit as a consolation prize. The 4 day thing can temporarily go away at the drop of a dime. If business needs says that there needs to be a 5th day, Senior leadership will make the call. The lead time on this could be as little as a day and it could go on for weeks at a time. Same with longer shifts. Associates work 10 hours, so as a leader expect an 11-12 hour norm due to pre-shift and post-shift meetings. When the associates get put on mandatory 12 hour shifts naturally it extends the leaders to 13-14 hours. This can be mitigated but not avoided. Even if you work very efficiently you will fall in this range. If you don't, it'll be even longer. There is not much true leadership development. Development often is learning new things and becoming more of an expert about the operations. However, not much in the realm of real leadership development that will be transferable and helpful in your career after Amazon. Obviously this depends a lot on your supervisor, but it's not made important, and therefore difficult to do even if the desire is there, due to competing demands. You will have to manage much more than you lead. There is extreme micro-managing and constant bullying. Managers get things done out of fear of consequences not of a true belief that what they are doing is the right thing. The amount of unnecessary email communication is frankly ridiculous. You will end up deleting over a thousand emails a day (no exaggeration). The important stuff is mixed in there so get control of that quickly through rules and email organization. While it is possible to avoid, the overwhelming volume often encourages people to log on often from home and get the emails sent to their phone. It's a personal choice. Very low integrity in terms of reporting. 80% of the people pencil-whip 80% of the reports. Trying to do it the right way will extend your hours and add a lot of pressure. From an HR perspective it's tough as well. Not a strong HR culture and I found that most of the people were just overmatched in terms of what they were asked to do. It's pretty scary the things that went on from inappropriate relationships to flat out lies and integrity issues. This was the scariest part of my experience as I felt that it could all come crumbling down.