Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

54% would recommend to a friend

(3,329 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

37% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,329 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
3.0
Aug 5, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is some of the best in the industry for a new grad, up there with Google and MS. Benefits are decent. Most teams work normal 40-hour weeks, unless you get unlucky enough to get put on a team with an insane workload or on-call rotation.

Cons

The culture hates developers and treats them like second-class citizens. Due to Jeff Bezos's obsession with miserliness (which he mistakenly calls "frugality") you will be given one standard monitor, one slow desktop, and one slow laptop with not enough RAM. If you want anything else, take it from an intern's desk after he/she leaves, or buy it yourself. In the same vein, funding to fix "developer pain" issues is non-existent. Could everyone's job satisfaction or productivity be vastly improved by having a few developers work on environment, tooling, or build system issues? Doesn't matter! You can either voluntarily spend your free time working on it, or do without. Actually lots of business-critical internal tooling is maintained this way, by "volunteers". Be prepared for tools you use every day to fall over when whatever random guy maintains them leaves the company! Management doesn't care. All hail "frugality"! Your manager will probably technically be a former engineer. But teams are informally run by business people here, not engineers. They love to strong-arm engineering managers into committing to dates for project launches without spending an appropriate amount of time investigating and scoping out the work. Oh, and the main reason projects take so long is because given a choice between spending two months on doing something correctly, and one month on some horrible hack that makes it kinda work but convolutes your entire architecture, guess what the non-technical people who run your org will pick EVERY time... It's gotten to the point that we have business code no one understands or is willing to touch, simply by "death by a thousand cuts" with no time ever allocated for refactoring. Don't even get me started on the space... I hope for your sake that you get put in one of the new buildings that are "only" normal high-density seating, not Amazon high-density seating. Otherwise, your work environment will sound like a high school cafeteria and be about as productive.

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