Amazon.com Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Very smart people. You will get to work with many high achievers from both the engineering and business worlds. Engineers get to learn a lot about business and see how high-achieving business managers function. Business managers get to work with and see how industry-leading engineering teams work.

Cons – Ridiculously hard to get promoted. You're more likely to see incompetent managers get hired into positions that they don't want to promote you to. Performance reviews and compensation systems are set up to allow the company to work you harder and pay you as little as they can get away with. Basically, you will only get a promotion or a decent raise when you work so hard that management runs out of excuses not to reward you properly. Very top-down management style. Every engineer's goals are the result of his or her manager's business goals which are trickled down from the "S-team" - the top level VPs of the company, and so bottom and mid-level creative initiatives tend not to happen. Engineers have to deliver on project after project with overly aggressive deadlines, support a huge operational load (i.e. pagers going off in evenings and weekends), and are then held accountable for quality-related issues. Many teams with bloated mid-level managers who demand lots of meetings, book keeping, reporting etc. TPMs and Dev Managers have to depend on tribal knowledge and personal networking to get anything done. Company emphasizes "Leadership Principles" which are the basis for how everyone ought to behave, but is vague and contradictory and only gives the impression - to those who drink the Kool-aid - that the company appreciates hard work as well as results, but in reality, they're no different from any other company who stack ranks their employees based on all sorts of subjective opinions. Reviews are full of BS and are mostly written after ratings have been determined. Eventually, the only engineers with rewarding careers at Amazon tend to be the fortunate ones whose managers know how to game the system, rather than play along with it. Everybody else eventually leaves - burned out and under-appreciated.

Advice to Senior Management – Shift the culture away from top-down, middle-management-heavy dynamics, and start fostering more focused and creative teams from below. Reward more. Promote more frequently from within. Recognize who the incompetent bozos are among management, and stop rewarding them more than your developers. Stop force-feeding the Kool-aid. Few are buying it - they're only playing along because they don't trust that you'd reward them for honesty.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com as an intern for more than a year

Pros – - Smart People. Barring the odd SDE/SDET, the vast majority of engineers at Amazon are really smart, motivated people who just get how things should be built
- You get to deal with really crazy problems of scale that few companies ever think about (except MS, Google, Apple and Facebook)
- If you know how to fix something, you just go and fix it
- AWS documentation is excellent with well-defined and well thought-out APIs
- Huge fleet (of machines) at your command.
- Agile and fast-moving with minimal bureaucracy
- Seattle is a beautiful city
- Great focus on the customer

Cons – - Company Culture of frugality is sometimes taken to an extreme when developers can't even get proper hardware to develop/test on sometimes
- Some Software Managers and Technical Program Managers don't necessarily meet the same quality bars that SDEs meet
- During peak times, long working hours are the norm
- Oncall means that you can be paged at 3am to solve a problem on the Website/Backend. Depends heavily on which team you work on.
- Lots of legacy code that keeps breaking resulting in people being paged frequently to fix problems. Teams that don't tackle technical debt means that these problems will continue to plague certain teams in the company. Other teams manage to get this right though.

Advice to Senior Management – Equip developers with the resources they need to succeed at times.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com

Pros – The pay is good, you work 10 hour days and only work 4 hours. i worked the night time shift which still wasnt that bad.

Cons – It gets really hot in the summer time. Depending on your job it can get repetitive and some jobs require more exercise then others.

Advice to Senior Management – Place more water throughout the warehouse.

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com

Pros – work experice you get is very good

Cons – very long hours for day, including holidays

Advice to Senior Management – no micromanagement

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – You will learn what it really means to be customer centric.
Company is much less bureaucratic than other large tech companies.
If you are smart, motivated, single and have no other commitments you can succeed.
You will learn a lot and ship a lot. It is true that 1 year experience at Amazon is equivalent to 2 years at any other large tech company.

Cons – Company is customer focused, not employee focused. Management does not care about you as a person. If you have kids and your wife is working, then Amazon is not for you.
A lot of churn in many groups. Plans, designs and everything else changes all the time. You have to be good at handling such churn.
A lot is expected from you. You need to be able to handle a lot of stress, be great at multitasking, and should be available round the clock (e.g early morning meetings with Europe and late night meetings with teams in India).

Advice to Senior Management – Middle management is trying to achieve ambitious goals through brute force instead of coming up with creative solutions.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – Benefits are top notch for the area.

Cons – Upper management has little interest in promoting qualified associates.

Advice to Senior Management – Become more transparent, let the people know what is really going on. Reward them for the good they do!

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – working to create new digital experiences and new platforms is cool, get to work with some smart people, brand recognition of amazon is great, stock price is doing well.

Cons – HR/Performance management systems are stuck in the 90's and don't encourage growth or risk taking. Middle management is under trained and in experienced - folks getting promoted based on politics and connections not on skills. Lack of people investment, people are worked hard and get burnt out.

The digital org - kindle + others - has grown incredibly quickly leading to some of these cons. Not sure how these issues exist in retail, aws or other orgs but lots of people are leaving digital for those orgs.

Advice to Senior Management – Communicate vision better, talk more to ground level employees, clean up mgmt orgs - take care of your people

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – - You will be able to learn a lot here. There are many interesting problems to be solved and you can be owner of the project pretty quickly.
- Seattle. While it gets really cloudy from September to April, it has really nice summer weather. Also, it does not snow much.
- Flexible hours. You can come to office pretty late and leave late if you have to.
- 401k, medical insurance.
- Free coffee, tea, and hot cocoa. You can have as many as you want.
- You can bring your dog to the office. You will be able to meet a lot of dogs here.
- Decent base salary with stocks. Amazon gives you decent amount of salary.

Cons – - On-call rotation. You will have to carry a pager and be in an alert 24 hours because one of software that you manage can go down, and system needs a way to tell you about it. It is not fun for anyone to wake up 3am or 6am in the morning once in a week to solve the problem. This brings a lot of time to be spent on operation rather than developing your skill sets.
- Bad work/life balance. Tight dead lines. On Thursday, some problem gets escalated and you need to solve it by next Monday, before your manager's meeting, which means you have to spend your weekend. This happens very frequently depending on your team.
- Not so much room for salary increase. Amount of increase of your salary will probably the lowest in the industry unless you get promoted. If you are exceptional but did not get promoted, you will likely get about inflation rate (or lower) increase in salary. You will soon be able to find out that people who joined a year or two later than you getting higher salary with less skills.
- Frugality. You don't get free food or perks. You will have to work everything on your single monitor and they will not accept your request to have multiple monitors.
- This is just a minor thing but 780 square feet office with 11 developers and 2 managers isn't a good place to focus on your work. You will be able to hear a dog barking every other 10 minutes in the office next to you.

Advice to Senior Management – Amazon is infamous for high turn over rate, and obviously, there is reason for that. The management needs to realize the cost of developers leaving the company, and treat employees well to prevent it. Otherwise, developers will leave and future developers will need to catch up and clean past works, while keeping tight deadline for new projects.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good pay and time off once hired.

Cons – never good enough to some managers esp. if they already don't like you

Advice to Senior Management – Bring better attitudes and respect to the table and you will def. get the same in return

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – innovative culture, chill environment, chill dress code, company subsidized café with organic food, respectful co workers

Cons – unless you negotiate well going in, don't expect a further opportunity at end of year review unless you are an executive
not all managers provide a challenging environment
salary is low so stock is vital
benefits are great
Orca card
shuttles between buildings and to train station
great tools to do your work re IT
people are predominantly nice

Advice to Senior Management – instead of signing bonus split over two years for the under $100K employees, make it one lump sum for one year

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend