Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

The on call schedule can be a serious burden. It limits the ability to make and keep commitments outside of work at times and can be a drain on an employee's family. They are also starting to lose their young, lean company feel. Process sometimes trumps results.

Amazon will eat your life - pager rotation sucks, and if your service needs babysitting, you may not have an ops team to handle the general things. What this means is that a lousy service will take your free time and interrupt your sleep one week out of 6-8. This would be as expected for a lot of things, but some services are naturally chatty (external systems, upstreams that file a pageable ticket to find out why your service is acting up, etc.). In addition, the workload can be high if you find yourself in the wrong place - choose wisely. The downside of free reign with teams is that there is often little consistency of behavior, as each team implements what it needs; this can cause problems if you need something not offered. It also impacts crosscutting concerns - coordinating multiple teams is almost impossible. Payments is a high stress area, as is anything that supports warehouses. Having been in payments, it's getting better, but I didn't get along with one or two of the managers; I got a bit burnt out, then was denied vacation that I desperately needed and tossed on a deathmarch project., so that colors my views a bit Amazon has cheap benefits (frugality is the watchword, but it burns a bit when the most significant bennie is a bus pass). On the flip side, you are paid well if you do well.