Amazon Software Development Engineering reviews

3.5

56% would recommend to a friend

(6,758 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

40% approve of CEO

53% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineering employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 6,758 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineering professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineering professionals compared to other employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

7K reviews
4.0
Jul 8, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fast paced dynamic environment. Smart co-workers. Strong sense of ownership in the decentralized model lends itself to designing and writing better software. Flexibility to explore alternate career paths.

Cons

- Benefits are poor. The 401k match is just 2%. Medical and dental plans are pretty ordinary. - Pager duty. Getting paged 40 times a week can be annoying. - Work/Life balance. I find myself working long hours more often than not.

4.0
Jul 8, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon is still growing, and there are a lot of great teams to work on. If you pick the right team with the right manager, there's a lot of opportunity to work on fun things like AWS or Digital Services, and get recognized and rewarded for your achievements. Some of the other highlights include: weekly tech talks to educate engineers on what's going on in the industry or to talk about a cool new technology that a team is working with, "fishbowls" - where popular authors or artists come to talk about their latest books and albums and of course, all the benefits of working in downtown (or close to it) Seattle. The dreaded pager duty that many Amazonians complain about again depends on the team you work on. On a large team, you can foresee being on pager duty once every 6-8 weeks. If your software service is critical and has a penchant for going down, this can definitely be hell. For some teams, where the service is not critical (support for internal teams, for example) or not prone to outages, pager duty can be considered a mild inconvenience.

Cons

The benefits are OK, but not up to par with the other leading tech companies, like Google and Microsoft. Stock bonuses are great when the stock price is high, but if the stock market takes a dive, suddenly that 10k bonus you were looking forward to could be more like 5k through no fault of your own. Being a large company means there is a lot of information spread around the company (a lot of it wikified in the internal company wiki), but it also means it can be hard to find information when you need it. There also seems to be a growing trend towards attracting new hires with higher and higher salaries, while not maintaining a sufficient wage increase for current employees. This leads to new hires coming in with higher base salaries (excl. bonuses) than some of their teammates who have been there for two to three years!

2.0
Jul 5, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is good opportunity for professional growth; there are plenty of chances to lead, and plenty of hard and interesting problems on which to work. Also, the company treats the customer very well. It treats the employee less well, however.

Cons

Benefits, especially for families, are poor. I pay about $4000 in medical premiums each year _before_ the $30 copays. Company not particularly charitable: not invested in Seattle and doesn't provide company matching. Oncall duty can be easy or awful depending on your group.

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