- Horrible work life balance. Some teams do a death march for months together, during this time it is expected that you put in long hours(50+ easily).
- SDM's at amazon are horrible. Most of them have no people management skills. I have known managers who were promoted despite having 80% attrition in their teams. no kidding.
- Amazon, for whatever reason, does not file Green Card for immigrant Level 4 employees. The justification given by the legal department about not meeting the criteria is fishy, especially since Microsoft and Expedia are able get the process going for Level 59 employees. L59 at MSFT is equal to Level 4 at amazon.
- SDE-1's are expected to demonstrate SDE-2 behavior for 5 months to be considered for promotion. This is something managers tell their employees every week in 1-on-1. Often, SDE-1s are not given enough opportunities to demonstrate such behavior ie good projects to work on etc
- On call (for engineers) is basically paying the price for your predecessor's mistakes. There is zero documentation. Tribal knowledge is rampant. Due to constant churn and internal attrition, you will end up going on call once a month, which is like 12 weeks a year. Basically this means, for an entire quarter of an year, you will be doing everything except for writing code.
- Finally, the feeling of camaraderie is missing. There are no free lunches, or free happy hours. Team building events are unheard of. You will be looked down upon as a weirdo if you try to get too friendly with your team mates. The expectation is to prevent social cohesion.
- Finally, for SDE's there is no career growth after hitting SDE-2 mark. Less than 2% of engineers make it from SDE-2 to SDE-3 level.
