Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

51% would recommend to a friend

(3,319 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

35% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,319 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
2.0
Jun 22, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can learn a lot in a short amount of time.

Cons

It feels like you are doing time in order to launch your career. The work is boring for the most part. The challenging problems you work on have more to do with sloppy design, lazy programming, horrible planning, than anything remotely interesting (from a computer science perspective). Amazon tries to preach this idea that you are working with the smartest people that you'll ever work with. This has been far from the case so far. Yes, there are some people there that are really brilliant, but those people really stick out since they are so rare. For the most part, the developers are solid, although they tend to be sloppy and careless. And there are some developers that actively try to avoid responsibility, make things difficult for others, or are openly hostile to people around them. Unfortunately, I've seen quite a few of these types while being there.

3.0
Jun 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You learn a lot. You work in small teams where you are an owner of your software. This means that you own everything, from writing the code to testing it to deploying and managing your fleet of machines. Depending on which team you are on, you will end up working with some cool technologies. This includes Amazon Web services (S3, EC2, SQS). You will most likely end up writing large-scale distributed systems. Like I said before, you will learn a lot. Depending on the team, you will not have support engineers or QA people to help handle operational issues and testing. You have to do everything yourself. This is a good thing, in that it gets you into the startup mindset.

Cons

You have to carry a pager to support your software. This means that you will be woken up in the middle of the night when you are on-call. Everything moves at glacial speeds. Projects that should take 1 or 2 months take 6 months. The bureaucracy is stifling, depending on which team you end up with. Any sort of project that requires work from multiple teams ends up progressing very slowly. Depending on the team, management can be very reluctant to approve of any clean-up work to improve legacy codebases. Pushing a new idea through is very difficult. I have tried doing this myself, only to be turned down. I have heard of many other cases where it takes up to 2 years to push a good idea through all the levels of management.

3.0
Jun 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are lots of varying opportunities, some really smart people, and the problems they are trying to solve are huge.

Cons

The management, lack of office space, the management, poorly executed products, insular teams that are so overwhelmed their first instinct is to push back on any request, lack of communication, lack of QA, no real documentation of any kind, and lack of a standard development platform.

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