Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Everyone makes a 24x7 commitment to their work and there is tremendous pressure. You will burn out; management is trained to recognize burn-out and offer you various forms of time off depending on the seriousness of the matter. Leadership also has a tendency to dabble in the weeds a bit; I've worked with Senior VPs who felt it necessary to review APIs and database models, mine metrics reports for flaws and question seating arrangements.

On call and operation load is a significant part of the job, but not a significant part of the job description. There is little effort to retain or reward employees. Employees are given responsibility over projects, but not the authority to make changes. It's a very top down company, and sadly, there are often cases where a project is redesigned at the last minute because middle management didn't get sign off from senior management, or senior management was flakey. There's no institutional memory, because of the high turnover. This means that people are reinventing the wheel a lot, often in parallel.