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Amazon Web Services

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Beware of the blame game and PIP culture - Partner Development Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

2.0
Jul 12, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good pay, name recognition, ability to make lots of industry connections.

Cons

At AWS, and Amazon in general, you will at a risk of PIP every six months, regardless of your past performance or contribution. AWS has a blame-game culture. When something doesn't go right, they will find a scape-goat. And if you are at L6 or lower, you can become a target of that blame game easily. Once your manager identifies you as a target, they will start to systematically and deliberately give you written "suggestions" or "feedback" for how you can improve. They will make it sound like this is for your own good, but the ultimate goal is to get rid of you. Over weeks or months, the negative feedback will be cranked up. Your manager will start finding faults at everything you do and will start telling you how you are missing on the (utterly BS) Leadership Principles. One fine day they will email you, giving you a list of tasks to do over the next few weeks. Congratulations -- You are on a "Focus" (your manager won't use this word)! The focus may continue for a few weeks or months. During this time, the written criticism of your work will ramp up. One fine day, your manager will tell you that we need to take the next step in the process - "Pivot". Long story short, this entire process will leave you feeling drained and worthless. In the end the mental agony of going through the Focus-Pivot process makes you wonder if the pay is really worth it all. You will be particularly vulnerable to this process during the first two years. So even if you join AWS, keep your resume updated and keep your options open.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
May 17, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good work culture Supportive leaders

Cons

No cons Full time onsite is tough

4.0
May 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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