Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

53% would recommend to a friend

(3,326 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

37% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Non Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,326 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Non Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Non Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
2.0
May 28, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Many challenging technical problems to tackle as an employee. They give lots of room for you to shine but also rope to hang yourself. It's a very dynamic culture and promotes best solution at the time. This could be bad though since it also means a lot of bad solutions are introduced before the best comes out.

Cons

Be prepared to move groups every year or two. You will get managed out if you're in lower end of reviews. Middle management changes direction too much. It's a very operations oriented culture, that means pager duty for everyone. Depending on group you could spend a lot of time fire fighting.

4.0
May 20, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Lots of +ves about Amazon like - ability to make an impact to end users - talented and smart people to work with - no need to re-invent the wheel for the most part, so get to work on exciting stuff

Cons

-ves - pager duty for SDE, this sucks you are pretty much tied down to your work/home for that week as you need to respond to pages within minutes - do not agree with stack ranking for reviews - higher burn out rate, usually see developers lasting about 2 years before they move on

4.0
Apr 4, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are a lot of smart people at Amazon. We work on the cutting edge of technology, and all of our problems are interesting. As for the teams I've worked on, it feels still like a start-up, each product is still immature, it's your job to make it better, and to scale it.

Cons

Amazon is a cheap company. Period. They make up for it with compensation, but don't expect frosting on the cake. Sometimes you feel like the tools are working against you, there is a lot of legacy code, and you may need to maintain something that has nothing to do with what you are developing. On-call rotation can be pretty stressful and demanding, depending on your team.

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