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
3.0
Jun 15, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Because Amazon is not focused on previous experience, it is easy to get hired right out of college. Amazon is an environment where you can easily grow and learn a lot.

Cons

Despite the above, Amazon has a VERY high turnover. This is due in large part to the fact that there is nowhere to advance to. It is virtually impossible to achieve meaningful advancement without leaving the company.

3.0
Jun 15, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You get to work on the cutting edge architectures - webservices, SOA, middleware. There's a 360 degree view to engineering where you can get involved with not only the end-to-end SDLC but from an enterprise architectural perspective as well e.g. capacity planning, load/performance testing, senior management reviews and presentations etc.

Cons

Operational support, operational support, operational support! The development center I was working at (Tempe, AZ) had a slave driver for a manager. He replaced very competent, intelligent and hard working people with suck-ups. Completely took the joy out of working for Amazon due to his micro-management and paranoia - his philosophy was to be a dictator and believed any one speaking out for anything meant that it was a bad reflection on him so he was hard on those who raised ANY concerns. The MAJOR issue with all of this was that senior management in Seattle was made aware of these issues on multiple times and NO action was taken ever. This eventually made a lot of us to leave.

2.0
Jun 13, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Surviving the abuse will give you unbelievable skills. Most of your peers are incredibly smart, competent, and talented people who will teach you all the things you didn't learn in school.

Cons

They don't tell you that "TDD" stands for "Ticket-Driven Development". The whole company lives and dies by the trouble ticketing system, but generally the accepted software engineering best practices are ignored. Since there is such an amazing trouble ticket system and nothing gets done unless it's a ticket, managers force death marches to launch awful code that is debugged one high severity ticket at a time by whomever is on-call. The attrition rate speaks for itself.

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