Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

Operational overhead - if you're lucky you will be on a newer team without much operational overhead. Most likely, you'll be spending a significant portion of your time dealing with operational issues (pages, data backfills, investigating production alarms, resolving issues with other teams, etc). Work-life balance is hard to maintain. Very little professional development - aside from the internal speaker's sessions, there are few opportunities for professional growth and development. Email - I have grown to despise Outlook more than ever before. How can people read this much email? development process - some teams do agile, some operate in a chaotic code-and-fix mode. There's little support for best practices across the company. If you are coming from outside and have done some reading/practice in software engineering processes, this place will feel like a gigantic step backwards. HR - there is essentially no human resources department in this company. For almost all questions you'll be talking to an email alias. ridiculous upper management escalations - seriously, do you need to critique form layouts when they've been designed by a UI expert? And your background is in what, again? internal build tools and frameworks - outdated, can be frustrating, little documentation

Burnout takes hold quickly for many employees, leading to high turnover in some departments. Amazon loves to celebrate all the new people who have joined since the last company meeting, when most are just replacing others who have left. Finding a good manager to work for is the key, but you can expect a new manager every six months to a year, which means you'll inevitably end up working for someone you don't like. The company used to be fun to work for when it was younger. Amazon now only hires the best of the best, which seems to have driven out all the interesting people on its way to become a well-oiled corporate machine. The average age of the company is still very young, and Amazon likes ambitious new college graduates. For those a little older, learning new skills to stay relevant in the company is something you'll have to do on your own time and money. Pager duty is a major pain. Smaller teams can expect to be on-call at least one week per month, while larger teams spread out the pain longer. Getting paged in the middle of the night for a high-severity problem that take eight hours of investigation to fix is enough to drive many to quit.