Choose your team wisely, can be a great or terrible place - Senior Software Development Manager Amazon Employee Review

4.0
Jun 22, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Published leadership principles and company values truly guide day to day decision making. A technology company primarily, and a retail company as well. Leadership in technology. Prefers to give teams every aspect of what they need to succeed, e.g. a team would have tech, product management, marketing, etc, and that would all go up to one person who is then responsible to succeed or fail with those resources. So no parallel team that is crucial to your success.

Cons

From the employee handbook: "We work long, hard, and smart, and two out of three doesn't count". Some groups, particularly old school groups, hold this more dearly than others and it can create a bad work/life balance where you are being effective but just arent working long enough. Most tech groups have an oncall rotation where people carry pagers or are otherwise on call 24/7 for a couple weeks at a turn. If that team has frequent trouble, you can be paged at any time with expectation of rapid turn around. Good teams manage this problem to be minimal. Great individual performance will only get you so far, you MUST impact surrounding teams to succeed. That's fine, but it starts from a relatively early level. Career path is hard.

Explore other reviews about Amazon

5.0
Dec 18, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazon pushes you to always be thinking bigger, improving your processes, and becoming more agile

Cons

Not for the faint of heart looking for a company where you can coast or fly under the radar

5.0
Jan 10, 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Really smart people, a lot of opportunity for growth, always encouraged to be innovative, think big, and create something new. Competitive salary and benefits with other major tech companies. 100% self motivating work environment. No dress code and 4 legged friends are welcome.

Cons

You have to be self motivated. NO ONE will hold your hand and tell you that you're doing a great job. If you need constant affirmations from management, this company isn't for you.

3159
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All