Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

55% would recommend to a friend

(3,334 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

39% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,334 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
Oct 31, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Junior engineers get a lot of meaningful, high impact projects. A lot of the technological problems have already been solved in a very scalable fashion, so someone right out of college is empowered to build great stuff.

Cons

As you progress in your career it's getting harder to find challenges to solve. Even though one of Amazon's tenets is think big and long term investment, sometimes shipping features fast trumps all of that.

1.0
Oct 30, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Absolutely huge company with tons of weight in the business world.

Cons

What team you end up seems pretty random to an outsider and is a pretty opaque process. Does not invest in its people, so if you were dumped in a team that is a disaster, you'll have to wait a year to move within the company, but you probably won't stay longer than that. Work life balance is non-existent. If you're in a smaller team's on call rotation, you'll be on call for a good chunk of time (and weekends aren't counted as work time(!), even if you have to be within a half hour of logging in when you're on call). Civility is in short supply because the people that manage to last more than the median tenure (which depending on where you look is as low as a year, Amazon doesn't advertise that) have usually managed to do it by exploiting knife fighting and stack ranking. This short tenure plays into Amazon's stock vesting scheme to ensure that at least half of employees won't receive any stock options at all. If you want to do any modern development (outside of Java), prepare to fight the infrastructure for months. but, hey, they pay a lot for that first year, so maybe you'll be into that. Just don't leave before then, because there are a bunch of clawbacks to keep you stuck after you realize you've made a mistake.

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