Amazon reviews

Horrible place to work if you’re already established in your career, have a family, or enjoy unplugging from work long enough to enjoy your evenings, weekends, holidays or vacations. Amazon is not a family friendly company, despite what they say to the contrary. You’re penalized for working from home even if there is a legitimate reason even if you’re more productive there than at the office. Amazon also holds onto the delusion that they are a start-up going after the big players in the market. They’re not. They are a mature “big player” company pretending to be start-up. All of the tools and data are home-grown; that translates into lots of bugs, inconsistent data, lack of a clear owner or desire by owners to maintain or fix their software/data, and catalog data that is lacking on details or consistency. This last point is important. If you’re the kind of person that loves making up data to suit your hypothesis, this is the place for you. If, however, you’re bugged by the inconsistencies you see from the same data sets but with different interpretations, you will be plagued with indecision and lack of confidence on a daily basis. Be prepared during your tenure to have your self-confidence and self-esteem battered on a daily basis. The position you’re applying for now will not be the same one you’ll be performing on a daily basis. You will be doing menial tasks daily, predominantly data entry, data validation, report generation and ticket resolution (and that’s if you’re a business owner like a vendor manager or product manager). In any given week, you’ll have about 8 hours total that you’ll be able to devote to your actual job, though you can easily do 40 hours a week if you work evenings and weekends. Amazon’s strategy for attracting the best and the brightest is to hire in the cream of the crop from colleges around the country, suck the creative juices and ideas out of their employees, then toss them aside with no clear path to career succession while they go ply the universities for other unsuspecting candidates. Their restricted stock plan is designed in such a way that you get trivially small amounts of stock in your first two years before it balloons for another two years. They do this because most people that go to Amazon leave or get fired between the first and second year. Competition is fierce at Amazon. Not just between Amazon and the outside world, or between the various Amazon teams, but within your own team. You will be forced to compete in terms of your effectiveness or production rate with your co-workers and you will be publically called out for not achieving arbitrary goals. The definition of “productive” is also a very arbitrary term at Amazon. You can have someone that does the bare minimum, who gets others to fix the problems they cause and who claim credit for work others did get called an “effective leader” and get promoted. You also get folks that work hard, long hours, usually 10 or 12 hours a day, late into the night, on weekends and holidays, who don’t take vacation, who then get fired within their first year because they weren’t “productive” enough. Amazon is highly fractured internally, with each group given a set of goals to achieve that are not aligned at the corporate level. The result is that you have groups duplicating the work of others, building solutions that solve their immediate need but create more work or disrupt business processes for others, and management groups often make poor business decisions because the mid-tier managers tend to only talk about the wins, not about the blockers or issues. Amazon, as a whole, is highly dis-functional whose mandate of becoming the largest online seller of “stuff” in the world has certainly made them successful externally, but has created a huge list of issues and process misses internally. Unless major amounts of resources are devoted to resolving the business processes and data integrity issues within the next few years, Amazon will see an increase in employee satisfaction, and higher costs of doing business (due to hiring in people to maintain antiquated data schemas and coding band-aid solutions rather than scraping the entire system for something much more scalable and less prone to bug defects). If you do get hired, you will have a significant ramp-up period on the order of six to nine months. Nothing is well documented at Amazon, despite their assertion that the Wiki has the information you need (which was true when they created the page two years ago but doesn’t reflect the actual state of affairs today), so you will have to train yourself on how to use the tools or from your co-workers if you’re lucky enough they can pull themselves away from their data processing long enough to help you.

- You do some development, but you are not a software developer. The title "software development engineer" is misleading and this is the first thing to be aware of when considering Amazon as employer. You may develop, but the vast majority of people spend most of their time doing other things, like fixing issues, testing, documenting, trying to plan the project, handling bureaucracy, adapting existing code, and doing some program and project manager work. After a few years at the company, I would say that I may have actually coded 10% of the time. You are more of a "software engineer", if this breadth of experience attracts you, but few will be technical experts that develop a lot. - Operation burden: there are teams that suffer with a lot of operation and the vast majority of developers need to be on-call – yes, you will be tied to a pager. The problem is that pager duty are usually 24 hours for 7 days and there is little to no respect from management about people that has to work around the clock. Don’t expect to have follow-the-sun model or any other arrangements unless things are very ugly (particularly true for AWS). Just to give you some numbers, there are teams that get paged more than once every hour of the day (yes, 25+ pages a day). You are expected to be online in a few minutes, so don't think that running a quick errand while on-call is a good idea if you are on such a team. - Long hours: examples are better than just saying things here. These were rewarded in AWS' all-hands meetings: a developer who called in to help debugging a ticket during his daughter's wedding and another developer that was working while his wife's baby delivery. This is the message that is sent and the bar is set so high about the dedication that, if you try to meet it, your life will be your work. Many do, especially if they are young. Some seem even think it’s worth the effort. - Long-term compensation: Amazon typically offers good sign-on bonuses and initial stock awards, but what is not said is that these bonuses and awards are going to be used in the following years not to give you any additional bonuses (manager’s talk is "including your shares and sign-on bonus, your compensation this year is pretty good, so I can't give you anything else"). There isn't cash bonus during performance review and, when managers give you stock awards, they are much lower than your initial stock awards. - Short-sighted: although Jeff Bezos is visionary, Amazon is still not a technology company and all development is target at the near future and how much revenue it will bring. Some AWS platforms would require much long term investment and vision to be more reliable or develop the in-house expertise, but they are often rushed for the business sake, which affects a lot of technical decisions. Although backed by a multi-billion business, Amazon is still not the company that will invest a few years into an effort without seeing the dollar value of that venture. - Lack of QA teams: since it's short-sighted, QA is very much below what one would expect for such large company with such systems - especially if we are talking about infrastructure for so many other companies, like AWS is. It's not uncommon to see tens of SDEs without a single person dedicated to testing (QA engineer, SDETs). - No learning/training on the job: do not expect to have much chance of learning on the job. You must do it on your own if you want your career to progress. - Career progression: your chances of career progression vary substantially depending on the business. Retail, AWS, and Digital are very different in terms of promotion and, depending on your group, the bar may be so high that it seems impossible to meet it in practice. That opens up a lot of opportunities for politics to take place. You may be stuck in your position for many and many years – do not be surprised to see competent people being SDE II for 10+ years, without prospects of any advancement. Also bear in mind that, although you can transfer internally, in practice that resets your history, so you better put up with your current team and do what your manager wants if you want to have any chance of being promoted. - Benefits/Frugality: they are OK, but nothing compared to other companies. You will have 6 paid holidays – no day after Thanksgiving for you, for instance. You will have to pay for your coffee at the company meeting. Good, but not the best hardware for your development – it’s not uncommon to see people paying out of their pockets for keyboard, more memory, better chair, and sometimes even buying or bringing monitors from home. Depending on the org, you will be able to expense books, but oftentimes it will be so much work to get your manager’s approval (including proving that it’s work related) that will not be worth all the effort. Team lunch? Be prepared to chip in as team events are rare and, not uncommon, your manager’s budget will not cover it all.