Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

There is a very thin line between being Frugal and being Cheap, my manager falls in the latter category. I can safely say that we would be the most frugal team in the WTC building. We had almost no outings, no fun and a manager who was paranoid about dates. There's very little scope for personal growth in Amazon, there are a few teams which have good work and are recognized most others are below average. I've met a handful of engineers who are satisfied with their job here. Promotions are at a snails pace, the only promotion that I saw in my team during my tenure was one SDE-1 getting promoted to SDE-2 after completing nearly 5 years with the company. On-call sucks, it can be made worse with a bad manager. There have been times when I had worked on high severity issues over the weekend late into the night and I get called by my manager at 0700 hrs Sunday morning where he wanted the summary of the event after he had woken up. Incase you are wondering what org I was a part of, it was TRMS.

People are treated very poorly -- I don't think they are even trying to compete with other top tech companies for engineers. My team inherited too much technical debt and brittle legacy systems that had been neglected for years despite causing increasingly serious problems as the business scaled. We spent all our time remediating customer issues but never building anything new or even properly maintaining our broken software. The on-call, status reporting, deployment processes, etc., were brutal as well. Overall, every aspect of working here was draining and I left as soon as I could. Fortunately I discovered that being an engineer outside of Amazon isn't so painful :).