Amazon Software Development Manager reviews

If you are joining as external candidate, please note that Amazon hiring bar is different than internal promotion bar. So in the hiring process, they will insist you need 10 years for L6, 15 for L7 etc, but internally there are folks with L6 at 5, L7 at 8-10. Hiring bar is also" better than 50% at a particular level", but promotion bar is only entry level of a bracket. This means that you will slowly move from imposter syndrome to Dunning–Kruger as you work with internally grown colleagues. For external hires, cultural adjustments will also take sometime. Overall you may end up growing slowly than your internal peers even after clearing so-called 50% bar. If you are working in non-Seattle locations, especially eastern economies, there are chances that some of the management have made their way in through middle level companies and they are making big money as Amazon has expanded big time with bloated egos. Providing insights to them is not easy. "Learn and Be Curious" leadership principle is regularly violated if you are coming from outside and have your suggestions/opinions. You will hear things to the tone of "This is what we do at Amazon" Amazon has met with lots of success recently, but from a bar perspective they are equivalent to other companies like Microsoft, Paypal, Adobe etc, despite what they tell you.

* A work-life balance is possible, but not 100% of the time. You will work harder than you ever have in your life the first year, until acclimated to the role and the operational calendar. * Until you are used to it, the pace of change can be dizzying. Office space moves, new teams, reorgs -- if you don't like it when someone "moves your cheese", you're not going to like it. * This is both a Pro and Con -- there is no influencing with authority. You have to find a way to get people on board with your ideas. For me this mostly has net positive, but if you don't like influencing, if you prefer to escalate to get your way -- you're not going to like it. And you will need to influence. There are many engineering teams and you're going to have to partner with a lot of them. * Every team has more work to get done than a single team could complete in a decade. This is good in terms of nobody getting bored, but can be stressful depending on the nature of the work.