Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

54% would recommend to a friend

(3,337 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

38% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,337 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
4.0
Dec 14, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Caveat emptor: Teams are pretty siloed here, which preserves some freedom and small-company feel while also making culture vary dramatically from team to team. I've heard of folks who made out worse than me, they ended up in that New York Times article. Your Mileage May Vary. That said, here's the good stuff: Fast pace, near continuous deployment, hard problems. Smart, fun coworkers who have become true friends. Ownership of your tasks through the full development lifecycle. Open feedback encouraged and practiced. You have the ability to introduce change, though some teams are more resistant to change than others, and regardless you'll have to work hard to make an impact. Good work-life balance for an intense programming job: yes the oncall rotation occasionally makes you answer a page at night, but you're not expected to work late generally, even under impending deadlines. The team owns deadlines, not individuals. Oh. Compensation is great, but you probably knew that already.

Cons

Top-down management style. Developers don't have much control over which problems they solve once they join a team, though they have lots of freedom in designing solutions. Promotions are opaque and often frustrating, though they're currently introducing new policies to try changing that. If your goal is to get promoted quickly, this is not the place to be. Gender ratio heavily male. Lots of old decrepit internal tooling, internal documentation is disorganized and often out of date.

5.0
Dec 14, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The salary is beyond great, computers and development tools are amazing. Love the company.

Cons

Wish we had better offices and free food. Amazon claims frugality is the way to go but Microsoft and Google employees enjoy much better perks.

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