Amazon Software Development Engineering I reviews

- In general, Amazon values really little their employees. It looks like if most of the people of your team quit the company every 1-2 years that's expected. People get burned out , and try to stay only as much time to get some of the stocks (you only get a little percentage the first year). If you search for people you'll see most quit either after 2 years -when you don't need to return your relocation bonus anymore- or after 4 -when stocks stop vesting. This means that you will get to work with demotivated people who are just waiting their best moment to leave. Amazon doesn't seem to care about any of this and they just keep on replacing people who leave, without taking any action to address the concerns that got people out in the first place. - This is a highly political company. There's no way that we are "working backwards from the customer" if teams are fighting over getting each other's stake. When your team gets into one of these fights and decisions are made without anyone being able to state a good reason for them, it becomes difficult not to get emotionally affected. - Salary increases do not account even for inflation, leaving you with less money the more time you spend there. Not me neither any of my colleagues got an explanation on what we were doing wrong to get such ridiculous increases, or any other suggestion rather than "get promoted". My rent and costs where increasing more than 3% each year and from Amazon I got a 1.3% increase after more than a year and a half. - This is secondary, but most benefits are just there for the sake of saying "we have those too". The dental and other insurances make you pay a monthly quantity and in general add little value over what you would get if you pay them by yourself if you were not in Amazon. - While I was there, there was a time where I was strongly thinking to go to US due to some personal reasons that made this almost a requirement for me. Amazon wouldn't support me because a few months before they added a rule stating that to relocate somewhere where you need a visa, you need to be an SDE-II and be in that position more than a year. Amazon has become the only company in my career so far that wouldn't help me relocate to a country where they have an office and positions available. This is something that can affect employees' lives a lot and they have introduced this as a vague internal rule without any explanation. But I guess visa sponsorship is expensive, and not worth it if the risk is just losing a replaceable SDE-I resource. - Don't even get me started on diversity.

Just take a look at the reviews here where the helpful rating is high and are written by folks who have worked at Amazon for >1 year. That will say more than myself just echoing it here If you have a competitive offer, then I think you should take that opportunity instead. Honestly, it's a dice roll if you're going to be happy and successful here. And I wouldn't put the odds in your favor (sorry). Just look at the average job tenure here. A lot of your success in your role, like a lot of places, is going to come down to who your manager is and who you work with. That's really what will make or break you. Here are some of the notable cons I feel are worth bringing up: - Seeing one of the folks who interviewed me crying in a 1-1 with her manager - Poor work/life balance - The MAWS (i.e. Moving to AWS) software development felt needlessly complex and stressful. It took forever to do anything. And there is often little to no accurate documentation to help you out - Good documentation writing was neither praised nor highly valued. But rather, your ability do "Dive Deep" and sort through sometimes a mess of a project to root cause a problem or implement a feature was praised - At the end of the day, the only leadership principal that matters here is "Deliver Results". If you can do that, then you can reasonably justify the other 13 LPs - Learn to say no. Be careful of you manager or others higher up trying to use the "Ownership" leadership principal to justify giving you more work to do when you're already overworked - The salary is alright. But depending on how hard you're going to have to work, it will start to feel like you're not getting paid enough for the amount of hours you're working - If you work here, and you feel like it's not working out on your team, then I highly advise looking for a new team immediately - There is a saying I've heard internally that "change is the only constant". I've noticed this the most with the relatively high turnover in employees - 5/15/40/40 stock vesting plan - It's a large company, it's easy to get lost in the thick of things - Little support for new engineers. It's more sink or swim