Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

This review applies to the office in Vancouver, Canada. Unbelievably cheap office, furnished like a sweat-shop, with worse furniture than found in student dorms. It is possible to undergo an ergonomic evaluation and get slightly better furniture, but this generally requires a minimum wait of 2-3 months because expense approvals take forever. In the name of high density, workspaces are packed to the limit, leading to very high noise and distraction, never enough conference rooms, and never enough washrooms. That's right, long waits for washrooms is the norm, and employees are sometimes encouraged to use nearby cafes to attend nature's urgent calls. Developers are forced to write code in slow virtualized environments because the underlying platform is obsolete and no longer supported by current hardware. Development tools are abysmal. There's no on-site recruiter, and near non-existent human resources staff. On-site security consists mainly of a grumpy elderly man who prowls the office and threatens the company's own employees for not wearing their badges visibly enough.

Not a big fan of on-call, and work life balance is not always very good.