Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

51% would recommend to a friend

(3,318 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

35% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,318 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
3.0
Jun 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You learn a lot. You work in small teams where you are an owner of your software. This means that you own everything, from writing the code to testing it to deploying and managing your fleet of machines. Depending on which team you are on, you will end up working with some cool technologies. This includes Amazon Web services (S3, EC2, SQS). You will most likely end up writing large-scale distributed systems. Like I said before, you will learn a lot. Depending on the team, you will not have support engineers or QA people to help handle operational issues and testing. You have to do everything yourself. This is a good thing, in that it gets you into the startup mindset.

Cons

You have to carry a pager to support your software. This means that you will be woken up in the middle of the night when you are on-call. Everything moves at glacial speeds. Projects that should take 1 or 2 months take 6 months. The bureaucracy is stifling, depending on which team you end up with. Any sort of project that requires work from multiple teams ends up progressing very slowly. Depending on the team, management can be very reluctant to approve of any clean-up work to improve legacy codebases. Pushing a new idea through is very difficult. I have tried doing this myself, only to be turned down. I have heard of many other cases where it takes up to 2 years to push a good idea through all the levels of management.

3.0
Jun 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are lots of varying opportunities, some really smart people, and the problems they are trying to solve are huge.

Cons

The management, lack of office space, the management, poorly executed products, insular teams that are so overwhelmed their first instinct is to push back on any request, lack of communication, lack of QA, no real documentation of any kind, and lack of a standard development platform.

3.0
Jun 15, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Because Amazon is not focused on previous experience, it is easy to get hired right out of college. Amazon is an environment where you can easily grow and learn a lot.

Cons

Despite the above, Amazon has a VERY high turnover. This is due in large part to the fact that there is nowhere to advance to. It is virtually impossible to achieve meaningful advancement without leaving the company.

Viewing 3310 - 3312 of 3,318 Reviews

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