Amazon.com Employee Review

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

Pros – Projects are interesting. You can get technical challenge with fellow software engineers. There're lots of smart people, here.

Cons – Work environment is not great. In the beginning, A shared desk was assigned to me without cube. A small war-room kind of office with 7 software engineers and there's no privacy while others kept complaining about smell of my coffee. I've never been in this kind of atmosphere. It might only be my team but quite discouraged to be creative.
The benefit was even worse. In normal company, HMO is the cheapest plan but Amazon offers the most expensive HMO option and there's wierd plan of health fund. Health fund is okay for who doesn't go to see doctor more than 7 times per year but totally out of sense when you had family. Premium was already high but out of pocket cost for hospital is another story. 401k matching is very low and the company tries to get employee's patent idea for free while my previous company always paid for it. Parking reimbursement wasn't enough to drive your car to downtown. There's no ESPP. And so on..
There's no formal training except new hire orientation which took only half day. No education support. It seems like this company only want to use your knowledge and has no interest to develop it.
On call duty is also painful. You need to carry the pager and it might beep in the midnight and must respond it within 15 min or it'll be escalated to your manager, director, vp, ...

Advice to Senior Management – You need to care your employees as human being.

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