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Amazon Web Services

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The Pay is Great, the Emotional Experience is Brutal - Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

2.0
Dec 29, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pay and benefits are wonderful. There are some truly intelligent and kind people at the bottom and mid-level of leadership. Everyone is given space to invent and change and even new employees at the bottom of the org chart may speak up and disagree on a direction. At AWS/Amazon, your experience really seems to depend on what kind of Manager you get to work under.

Cons

There is a lack of empathy at the higher levels in Sales and Marketing. They're completely focused on shareholder value and manage costs at the expense of people. Level 8 and higher leverage libertarian, technocratic, nonsensical, pseudo-meritocratic, stack-ranking mixed with nonsensical jargon to justify holding people back from professional progress. Middle managers are unable to effectively coach or mentor their people at the individual level, as the more important metric is un-regrettable attrition (i.e. getting rid of X% of the employees per year). This latter point is not so dissimilar from most corporate/tech institutions right now, I suppose; however, the dispassion and ego of senior leadership leads to borderline inhumane methods of execution. It seems that one must be skilled at turning their personal empathy off on demand in order to thrive and rise in the ranks. Light-hearted people cannot effectively lead here.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Chill, learn a lot, fast paced. Friendly

Cons

Nothing lol. No layoffs too at Annapurna labs (aws)

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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