Amazon Senior Software Developer reviews

Employee retention is bad, which should give you a lot of clues. In fact, sometimes I wonder if management doesn't want to retain employees beyond two years so that they don't have to pay out all of the restricted stock. I mean, there are no cash bonuses anymore that I know of, and the raises -- if you're fortunate enough to get one -- probably won't even keep pace with inflation. As others have said, the non-salary benefits are poor in comparison to other large companies. Your actual workspace is very spartan, and good luck getting a fast laptop or desktop and a monitor that does better than 1280x1024. There is a vast amount of crufty old code sitting around the backend databases and systems that nobody wants to touch, the original perpetrators of which are long gone, and management often does not have the foresight to rewrite. If you take a job here, keep in mind that you might suddenly find yourself assigned to maintain this pile, even if you have never done Perl or C++ in your life and you were supposedly hired to work on something else. For the most part, developers double as operators, so have fun wearing the pager while you're at it. Getting paged while on call should be the exception, but at Amazon, it's the rule. There is a lot of homebrew and non-standard technology in use which is usually poorly documented and difficult to use in any case, and if you're familiar with doing things the way that the rest of the industry does, you might find yourself frustrated.

The culture at Amazon is notoriously frugal, and that can feel penny-wise, pound-foolish after a while. The startup culture that existed in the early days is also not as prevalent, which can make staying motivated somewhat challenging when surrounded by people of varying levels of motivation. In the technical career track, Amazon does a pretty poor job developing and enabling the growth of their employees, aside from the very early stages of an engineers career, unless the employee is inclined to move into a management track. This lack of career development can be compounded by the large operational responsibilities of many teams, which makes it difficult for engineers to find the time to interact with groups outside of their general are and explore other opportunities that could help foster career growth.