Amazon reviews

There is no employee support. Areas of the business are segregated and managed according to the personalities of the leaders for that area. Compensation is targeted differently for different groups and employees are expendable. Employee investment is minimal. Benefits suck for the price. Pay mix is so stock heavy that, even at entry individual contributor levels, you are constantly watching a stock price you cannot affect in a meaningful way, waiting for your vest dates to make major purchases and pay property taxes. It does not contribute to a feeling of ownership, it must be what prison is like, marking the days.

The model of having many small independent teams has several downsides: - There is often duplication of effort because you can't convince a team you depend on to prioritize work you need, so you might end up doing it yourself. - Most teams do not have dedicated a support or operations team. This means SDEs are responsible for deployments, operational issues, selecting hardware, etc. Most SDEs are part of an on-call rotation.. when they are on-call they have to carry a pager and need to be able to respond to pages within 15min. The frequency and intensity of oncall varies greatly by team. - There is a huge variance in quality of life depending on what team you're on. If you work on a team that has a heavy ops burden or owns a lot of bad legacy code, you will probably hate it. In terms of culture, Amazon is a very frugal company. No extravagant benefits, fairly cheap office equipment, etc.