Amazon is a company that has very high expectations of its employees but does not offer much in exchange. Their SDE salaries are rather low compared with other tech giants. Benefits and perks are almost non-existent. As an SDE at Amazon you do not get free lunches, a fancy office, high-end developer hardware or other stuff you normally get at companies like Google, Facebook (that Amazon likes to consider itself at par with).
I was very surprised at the bad quality of their developer hardware. SDEs normally get only one 24 inch monitor. Their office chairs are very uncomfortable and are about twice cheaper than standard Aeron chairs that I have seen at most other companies I worked at.
Amazon’s “new” office in London that I worked at looks very old and sad. It was probably the cheapest office space that was available in central London. There is no canteen or even a coffee shop, no gym or anything like that. The free coffee available in the kitchens tastes awful. Sometimes there was some free fruit available in the kitchen, but it was usually gone by noon.
The majority of SDEs at Amazon are people from average universities or who previously worked at companies I’ve never heard of. So although the company claims to only hire the “very best” the truth seems to be a bit different.
Everyone in my team seemed to be very busy on a daily basis and worked much longer than the standard 40 hours per week. In addition to the normal tasks, Amazon SDEs have to do rotational on-call which means they have to be available 24 hrs a day in case something breaks down which, from what I heard from my team members, happens quite often. Sometimes people get woken up every night during their 1-week on-call period.
There is almost no mentorship or support, even in your first weeks of employment. You get thrown into normal work as soon as you join and are expected to do it with very little or no help at all.
To sum up, Amazon is a company that apparently doesn’t care at all about its employees. The average employee retention is below 2 years. During my time at Amazon, 2 members of my team left the company and no one new joined the team. I can’t think of any reason why anyone would want to work there as there are many companies that offer higher compensation, better working environment, better work-life balance and more interesting work.
