Amazon Web Services Software Development Engineer (SDE) II reviews

WLB is not that good in some teams

Used to be a great company with startup culture and a lot of innovation. Now they have added over a million people over the past 6 years in the work force and hundreds of thousands in the tech role, and the company has been polluted with toxic cultures from other companies both in management and tech roles . These managers and techies were hired after Amazon lowered their bar significantly to meet hiring goals. This is the biggest elephant in the room There is a lot of bureaucracy, quiet-quitting, sabotage, and employees compete with eachother for promo instead of being a team player. Every team is running on 10% of productive SDEs who don't get the respect and compensation they deserve for a stressful job that requires periodic on-call rotation and many sacrifice of personal life. There is a lot of unfairness in the promotion process due to cliques, circle jerks which are formed in every org. If you are part of the clique your mistakes and failures will be covered up or whitewashed and if you are not, you are scrutinized heavily for minor issues and sometimes embarrassed publicly. You have to stand your ground with data and be intellectually superior as this is mechanism the managers use to drive out / quiet-fire unfavored employees. This bad management and corrupt culture is going to cost this company a lot of pain and money in the future. What i have learned is when a company gets so big it's really hard to keep the culture going as it was.