Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

-Because we ship so quickly, oftentimes there are issues overlooked -Experience highly depends on the quality of your team -More hours=more rewards for learning, but little rewards from management that is often biased towards friends -Personal growth 100% in your own hands - manager does little to help This really bugs me. The range of experiences really depends on the team you end up on. If you end up on a team with very few coding standards, lack of good SDE's, a manager who doesn't reward people properly, and lack of technical understanding in the team overall - and these teams are out there in bunches - then expect to have a really mediocre experience, even if you put in the shifts. At some point, when you are critical for every project your team owns, some teams can be very demanding by having you on-call 24/7 - if at any point something related to that breaks, they will call you, regardless of who's on-call. Also, be wary of managerial nepotism. Some teams aren't entirely meritocratic. Managers might just promote/rewards people they are friends with/most senior, NOT who has contributed the most to the team growth.

Poor direction from senior management who couldn't decide what they wanted. Bureaucracy. Oh, the bureaucracy. Politics. Woe betide you if you worked in a group or on a project that senior management didn't find sexy. Churn. Despite intensive recruiting, people left faster than they could be replaced. The hiring bar was rightly high, but there were too many ways to fail the interview for spurious and/or arbitrary reasons. The recruitment process may work better in Seattle where Amazon is one of the biggest names in town, but the competition for developers in London is too intense. There are other prestige tech giants, there are big media companies, there are startups, there are banks with deep pockets. In this environment, Amazon can't turn down good people and meet its hiring needs (and indeed, they had to import lots of staff from Seattle to keep the office afloat). On-call. Being woken up in the middle of the night got very old after a while. And finally, the kicker: work-life balance. The company pretty much destroyed a few of my colleagues. Amazon are very good at using guilt to get people to work all the hours God sends, for no particular reward. At the end of one spectacularly hellish project, everyone got -- a T-shirt. Not the best way to make your employees feel valued.