Amazon reviews

First of all Amazon is like many different companies rolled into one. What your work life is like depends entirely and absolutely on specifically which group and project you get hired into. You can be in a hell-on-earth type engineering position and be one office away from somebody working their dream job depending on the project you are working on. So take positive as well as negative reviews here of the place with a grain of salt. That said, this is a negative review. Generally Amazon is incredibly political with layers of management and various warring factions within the layers. You can easily end up in some project that exists in contested ground leading to a situation in which your contribution will come under undue scrutiny from various actors. The management of the place seems to revel in this kind of culture; they seem to want it to be this way. If you are the typical introverted programmer type who is bad at the social aspect of life, prepare to be somebody's pawn or to be stabbed in the back. You can just ignore the politics but the politics will not ignore you. There are reorgs constantly; one never knows where one stands. One's boss changes frequently. On-call a week out of a month is the norm, sometimes it is the more. You will be expected to work long hours pretty much always. When I was hired I was told our group would never be put on-call we were after a month. My boss changed after a month to my boss's boss who was literally a sociopath. After a while another programmer in my group managed to engineer basically a coup and got sociopath guy fired but by that time it was too late for me. I was burnt out. the whole dynamic of software development there is about hiring young people who haven't had a lot of prior job experience and burning them out. I was not young,I had been around the block software job-wise and I thought I could just stick it out for the carrot on the stick but, basically, I couldn't do it. At a certain point I just wanted my life back.

- Terrible oncall in almost every group. You will get very little sleep. All manner of abuse of employees is justified on the basis of Customer Obsession (employees are not treated as 'customers'). - Software quality is often sacrificed by managers to meet deadlines and blame for failures placed on engineers (so the only way for a SDE to deal with a sev-2 is to kiss that long weekend goodbye and at least show you are working on the problem). - Turnover rates in some groups are very very bad, particularly some platform teams. Managers last less than six to twelve months (these folks typically leave Amazon because you can't transfer internally before 12 months are over). If you are an SDE, forget about stability and continuity. - As AWS becomes successful, the platform teams are getting political at the manager/sr. manager levels. The organization runs on fear. You don't know when you'll get thrown under the bus. It's less of an issue at the SDE level. - Expect to beg for productivity software and decent quality laptops/computer peripherals (or buy your own). This applies across Amazon.