Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

1. Very twisted compensation package. You are evaluated based on salary+stock, which should be 'given' although not vested, but the management sees that as 'you are well compensated' and would give away next to nothing for the hard work next year. 2. Terrible on-call. It's really a nightmare. Work-life balance is as bad as the worst story your friend told you. IT'S ALL TRUE. 3. Very bad benefit package. But you knew it when you got the offer, so can't complain too much about it. 4. Middle management is not transparent at all. You see the tree but not the forest. Sometimes they'd lie about promotion/compensation to get you work extra on top of already overloaded work-life balance. But it could be just my case.

Well, employees are not what Amazon cares about. Period! There are too many things to list here when you compare with other technology companies: lower than industry package, very slow/hard promotion process, many bad managers who care little about employees (the only way to be a "good" manager there), very stressful work environment, work-life balance is non-existence... Employee turn-over is very very high. Very few employees stay more than four years. On top of that, the hiring bar is extremely high. No wonder there are never enough people to do the increasing amount of work. Two things are particularly stupid: - Your review pay increase is limited by your previous stock grants! If you have many previous stock grants, either from your sign-on bonus or previous review grants, during employee performance review you could get _zero_ increase even if you did an excellent job that year. The company thinks you are compensated enough! It seems they are afraid of employees making too much and ensure that won't happen. - If you are an entry level engineer who need a greencard sponsor, stop join Amazon. The company won't sponsor low level employees until they are promoted to next level. PhD does not matter! That is 3 to 4 years delay in the greencard process. That is a huge deal for foreign origin employees. Many new engineers just left once they found out that.