Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

Managers have no vision and some of them are terrible at managing people.

Extremely hierarchical - what matters is meeting deliverables and pleasing the higher ups. No work/life balance. Meetings scheduled outside work hours are quite normal; deadline pressure is significant and you'll be expected to sacrifice your personal life to meet them regardless how stupid the original estimates. On-calls can be hell. Depending on your role it may mean doing some occasional quiet shifts one every few months or you may find yourself in a role where you are almost always on-call. Its hell when can't be away from the laptop and find yourself being paged out of bed at 3am to handle problems or join conference calls. Frugality is considered to be a corporate value - it means they're cheapskates. The Amazon values are repeated in cult-like fashion as though they are deep insights rather than the banal corporate drivel they are.