Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

Breakneck Speed of Development Ambiguity of Product Development Secret Project Anonymity

After a few years it became apparent that they didn't want trained managers, but instead just "yes people." No amount of suggestions that they run the new managers through training seemed to be heard. Pager duty, you will come to hate it. If you have no life, you might not notice, but if you have a family they will hate it. It's what house arrest is all about. Oh sure you can go out, but you need to start working on a page within 20 minutes and not leave it until it's resolved. Try explaining that to your kids why you just packed them up from the park. Or your SO, why you need to get a box to go for dinner. Pay rates, They have a 2 and a 4 year plan. That's because that's the length of time you need to wait for that first vesting of stock and signing bonus and the majority of that first grant. Stack ranking, or rat on your co-workers to try and keep your job during review time. They cut the bottom 5% no matter how good they are in comparison to the rest of the world. They give PIP's to the bottom 10% (Ie threaten them), no raises to the bottom 20%. So if you have a group of 100, even though the company spent thousands on hiring them, waiting until they actually figured out how to do anything useful, training on the internal systems, they toss them right back out. What a waste of money. (It also demoralizes the team for a month or so every review cycle.) If you want a better written review of the place, go find that NYTimes article, it was spot on.