Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Depending on your team and your project, the work-life balance for software developers and software development managers can be very poor (frequent on-call rotations, 50+ hours per week norm, unreasonably demanding management). This varies greatly from team to team. Some teams are excellent at providing a good balance, and others are meat-grinders. It depends so much on your management chain. Can your manager negotiate appropriate boundaries such that other teams do not take advantage of you? Is your manager obsessed with arbitrary delivery dates, and will he or she pressure the team at all costs to meat them? Does your manager know how to put together detailed multi-quarter delivery plans? If the answers are "yes", "no", and "yes", then you should be alright.

- Team experience varies widely across the company. I've heard stories similar to the worst of them: folks working insane hours on unreasonable deadlines, etc. I will say it's gotten better--the market is so tight right now that those teams either adapt or perish - Amazon-scale is a double-edged sword. The problems you get to solve are like no other in the world. But on the other hand, everything you want to do is enormous and complicated. Systems are broken across teams, and every new thing that you want to do is likely to require contacts across multiple teams and even multiple organizations. Luckily, Amazon has a formal mentorship program to help newer folks navigate