Amazon Software Development Engineering reviews

3.5

56% would recommend to a friend

(6,757 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 6,757 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
2.0
Jun 22, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can learn a lot in a short amount of time.

Cons

It feels like you are doing time in order to launch your career. The work is boring for the most part. The challenging problems you work on have more to do with sloppy design, lazy programming, horrible planning, than anything remotely interesting (from a computer science perspective). Amazon tries to preach this idea that you are working with the smartest people that you'll ever work with. This has been far from the case so far. Yes, there are some people there that are really brilliant, but those people really stick out since they are so rare. For the most part, the developers are solid, although they tend to be sloppy and careless. And there are some developers that actively try to avoid responsibility, make things difficult for others, or are openly hostile to people around them. Unfortunately, I've seen quite a few of these types while being there.

2.0
Jun 18, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great place to learn the fundamentals of highly distributed/scalable transaction oriented development. Must be young, hungry and kid-free to fully appreciate the experience, it's fast and furious.

Cons

You work very hard, not so bad unless you like to see your kids. The fact that the developers often become first level support for mission critical services, yes this means you will often carry a pager that will wake you at 3 in the morning because a server in Japan is performing aberrantly. There is this aura of thrift that after while creeps darkly into your morale, notably the "horse stall" like offices. It literally seems to be modeled after a warehouse-based sweatshop, right down to the "desk doors". It goes without saying these people are not great followers of Feng Shui.

4.0
Jun 18, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You get to work on challenging problems and learn from some of the best engineers out there. There also tends to be a clear correlation between what you're working on and tangible business objectives. Also, individual development groups have a lot of autonomy in how they work. (This has it's downsides; see below.)

Cons

Amazon's philosophy of minimal top-down policies on how work gets done leads to a lot of duplicated work, a lot of ways to do the same thing depending on which group you're working on, and a lot of confusion.

Viewing 6739 - 6741 of 6,757 Reviews

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