Amazon System Engineer reviews

Amazon is an orchestrated chaos with deep internal culture. It is not that this is bad or insurmountable but for most it requires about nine months to become acclimatized. As in many places employees must be aware of their need for life balance and can easily burn out. The Seattle housing market is not sane. Childcare costs are staggering.

* Oncall is tough and will actually affect your health in short term * Most of the technologies used are in-house developed and you won't take that experience away with you * They expect you to perform multiple different tasks at the same time, e.g. design a project, code on another, perform deployments and be oncall * Stress is quite high due to highly critical systems with paying customers * Compensation is relatively lower than in other tech companies, no food is provided and no bonuses whatsoever (you can get 1% or less salary increase per year) * Poor management leading to understaffed teams, unhappy employees who eventually leave * They prefer new features rather than fixing old bugs