Amazon System Engineer reviews

Where you land in the company matters to your experience of it. This review is for the AWS org and Identity in particular. * In my 2+ years there, I had 6 different managers on paper, two different skip-levels, and the entire org structure up to the VP was replaced * In my 2_ years there, I had exactly four meaningful conversations about career progression with a manager, and absolutely no tangible effort was made by any of my managers to give me a way to make it happen * Systems Engineers are treated as if they have no expertise within the org and are considered to be of lesser value than a similarly-leveled SDE * Managers are allowed to run roughshod over IC's and nobody in the leadership chain bats an eye over it * If you manager doesn't understand the work you do and why it is important, your career is absolutely screwed * Managers tend to have way too many reports (far above the traditional 2PT), so you are almost certain to get thrown under the bus when something goes wrong * The org operates under a culture of fear that the line managers hide from directors as much as they can by blaming as many problems as possible on IC's * Nobody within leadership has shown evidence of being interested in taking responsibility for the damage done to morale and the destruction done to careers

Everything else is enterprise software development and never ending on-call rotations.