Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

They don't tell you that "TDD" stands for "Ticket-Driven Development". The whole company lives and dies by the trouble ticketing system, but generally the accepted software engineering best practices are ignored. Since there is such an amazing trouble ticket system and nothing gets done unless it's a ticket, managers force death marches to launch awful code that is debugged one high severity ticket at a time by whomever is on-call. The attrition rate speaks for itself.

I joined my team last, but somehow became the most productive person in the team of 7 after 1.5 years. Probably due to the fact that I was young and naive, and believed that more good work I produce, faster I would would get promoted and receive raises. Not quite. I was working 140 hour weeks, having almost zero social life. They gave me a 1.5% raise after 1 year, citing that promotions and raises are not normally dished out to people who has been their for more than 1.5 years. The max raise was 3% annually, which was only 6 months after my last review period (which was discarded because I was too "young" in the company). So despite the highest performance rating on the scale, I received a prorated 1.5% raise. I was the engineer primarily responsible for launching a new store in the company. 5 days of almost zero sleep in the war room. Before the launch, my manager promised extra vacation for me to unwind, big raises and promotions. After launch, I barely saw the guy anymore. I quit soon afterwards. Then I found out the guy was trying hard to climb into the director seat. Which he did. While I received no pad on the back, no raise, no promotion, no extra vacations, the VPs all recieved a 2 million cash bonus, and directors 1 million. The only recognition I received was a $1.50 coffee purchased by my VP after 3rd night straight in the war room. When I played a small part in accidentally revealed project on the main site, which received wide press coverage. (Many other played a bigger part). I was the only one to own up to my mistake. Therefore, I was single handly scapegoated for the incident. I was not allowed to defend myself in front of the post-modem committee, because management deemed 3 hours out of my time would jeopardize the project. So they wrote something in my place admitting guilt. When I was leaving, I was appointment manager of two new hires. Even though I was still SWE1 (they never talked to me when the HR promotion cycle came and went). Both new hires were paid 10k more than me a year, plus 5k more cash bonus. That's when I just left. If you are a masochist, or curious about what complete hatred for the human race feels like, go work for Amazon.com. For that, they won't disappoint.