Amazon.com Employee Review

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

Pros – Everyone at Amazon is smart and fun to work with and do not subscribe to the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) that plagues software so big ideas can be followed through on. Compensation is generous with a salary, signing bonus, and restricted stock units. Hard work seems to rewarded with promotions and stock options, I have not been at the company long enough to have had my own experience with this.

Cons – Different teams at Amazon have wildly different experiences, which range from poor to awesome. Some teams have operational issues that basically turn their SDE's into highly paid support engineers that grinds software development to a halt and destroys work life balance due to every SDE having occasional 24-hour "on-call" duties. This is not the case on my current team, but definitely a risk for anyone taking a job at Amazon.

Advice to Senior Management – Hire support engineers. SDE's maintaining their own software to promote quality sounds like a good idea, except employee turnover and role changing is high enough that most of the bad software teams are supporting was created by someone else.

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