Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,120 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

50% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Amazon has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 209,120 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amazon employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

209K reviews
3.0
Apr 3, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The best part is the flexible hours. The job is project based, so as long as you get your stuff done, you can come in early, late, whatever. While the job is technically an office job, you can work from home on days that you have a doctor's appointment, or if you are feeling under the weather. You get a laptop, which is nice. The BUS/Transit pass was a real nice perk. You can opt for subsidized parking if you prefer. You get stock grants, and good health benefits.

Cons

General salary information for jobs is not provided. I never knew what my coworkers made. When you are applying for an internal job, there is no mention of general pay scale. For me, that made it difficult when trying to gage where I wanted to go in the company. Recognition of accomplishments doesn't happen very often. For example, if you create a new tool for your team, almost no one notices. But if you make a minor mistake, you get in trouble with management. I suppose that could differ from manager to manager though.

2.0
Apr 2, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you are interested in massively scalable systems, Amazon is great to understand what true scaling means. If you are early in your career, Amazon can expose you to a wide range of technologies, and give you a a lot of responsibility quickly. There will also be a lot of people like you to hang out with, develop friendships with and so on. Amazon does a lot of college hiring, so there are a lot of like minded bright people in the software engineering areas. There is an employee discount, which is nice to have. Seattle is a great area. Amazon has a lot of tools support for software engineers, and puts a lot of effort into making it easy to build, deploy and update software.

Cons

A weird mix of micro management and a demand for ownership. One of the key concepts at Amazon is that individual teams own their product/project, and the teams are encouraged to understand and drive the direction of the projects. At the same time, there are a lot of mandatory corporate initiatives that you have to do, sometimes leaving you with very little time to do the "customer-centric" things that are supposed to be the mainstay of the engineering work. There's also a lot of nit-picking and second guessing if you actually take that ownership. Almost all engineers are responsible for supporting their own software, which is supposed to encourage the building of quality software. In practice, this means that software engineers are on-call for a week, and have to get up in the night to answer any issues that come up. Not so bad if you are on a 8 person team, which means you have to do this once every two months, but really bad if you are on a 3 person team. This burns people out pretty badly, and leads to bad code - you can't focus if you were up all night. An arrogant believe that Amazon engineers are better than almost anywhere else. I've worked at a lot of good companies, and while the new college hires are natively bright and talented, many of them are inexperienced. Amazon doesn't seem to have a lot of engineers with 10-12 years of experience, who could grow the skills of these talented newbies. I've been in places with much better engineers. But I've heard Amazon middle management claim that they can pull off extremely ambitious schedules because they have Amazon engineers. Pressure.... pressure .... pressure. A lot of demands, a lot of context switching, and a lot of statements that imply that you need to step it up and deliver.

3.0
Apr 1, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is no explicit path to promotion. One day you are all of a sudden approached as a candidate for management. .

Cons

There is no explicit path to promotion. One day you are all of a sudden approached as a candidate for management. If you keep your nose clean, you are a candidate for a "great new job" with no training in how to be a manager. Like every role at Amazon, one is left to sink or swim and of course the danger of sinking as a manager is that you are taking your direct reports with you. Amazon uses "Situational Leadership II" methodologies, but one is implicitly expected to reject those philosophies as "lame" and "soft". The unspoken theme of survival at Amazon is "zero-sum".

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