Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

the facilities are very mediocre and downright poor in some cases. the management does not mind cutting costs on the facilities provided, there is not much to refresh during work, the cafeteria is bad, poor phones, not many meeting rooms, no TT tables. some teams work on 24 by 7 support model which is very bad. some managers care only about the quantity of work and not quality. not much interaction between various teams like in seattle, the teams here keep to themselves. not much innovative ideas come from the indian team, inspite of having great talent, the management does not seem to be using them well.

You get a pager pretty shortly after starting and are expected to respond to it at all hours. Management expects everyone to work crazy hours and thinks nothing of asking you to work weekends, nights, or even cancel your vacation to support a project launch. Cooperation between teams is nearly non-existent and you will often wind up implementing necessary features yourself. Due to political wrangling you can wind up taking on responsibilities far outside of your realm, like taking over QA's job for a spell. You are expected to provide frontline support for the databases despite your level of database knowledge. Unless you are really lucky or really senior, expect to spend < 25% of your time actually writing software - most of your time is spent troubleshooting or triaging emergencies.