Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

54% would recommend to a friend

(3,345 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

37% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,345 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
5.0
Aug 4, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Talented Team Passionate Organization Latest & Greatest Technology

Cons

Breakneck Speed of Development Ambiguity of Product Development Secret Project Anonymity

1.0
Jul 30, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I got in early so I made money with the stock options. And I needed a job at that time and they gave me one. I also got to build the core software that keeps track of how many things are available for sale at a given moment. I learned a lot from an older co worker about the fungibilty of inventory, the theory of item is promised to a customer at a point of time, etc. How to build a system that is resilient to outages, bad data, data that is stale etc. I also liked most of the engineers I worked with. If you work here, you will be given tasks that at other companies would go to older and more experienced workers. The reason is that at the pay rate, those folks have left. or wouldn't join as they have other options.

Cons

After a few years it became apparent that they didn't want trained managers, but instead just "yes people." No amount of suggestions that they run the new managers through training seemed to be heard. Pager duty, you will come to hate it. If you have no life, you might not notice, but if you have a family they will hate it. It's what house arrest is all about. Oh sure you can go out, but you need to start working on a page within 20 minutes and not leave it until it's resolved. Try explaining that to your kids why you just packed them up from the park. Or your SO, why you need to get a box to go for dinner. Pay rates, They have a 2 and a 4 year plan. That's because that's the length of time you need to wait for that first vesting of stock and signing bonus and the majority of that first grant. Stack ranking, or rat on your co-workers to try and keep your job during review time. They cut the bottom 5% no matter how good they are in comparison to the rest of the world. They give PIP's to the bottom 10% (Ie threaten them), no raises to the bottom 20%. So if you have a group of 100, even though the company spent thousands on hiring them, waiting until they actually figured out how to do anything useful, training on the internal systems, they toss them right back out. What a waste of money. (It also demoralizes the team for a month or so every review cycle.) If you want a better written review of the place, go find that NYTimes article, it was spot on.

1.0
Jul 29, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Being a software developer, you get to be a part of an elite tech community. There are a lot of things going on internally that you can use to grow your knowledge and skills. This is the only thing I liked over here. However, you may not get much time for these things.

Cons

My manager was all the time looking to stack rank employees and put his favorites on top. His favorites know that they are being favored so they always remain mum about all the wrong that is happening with you in the team. These things don't stop here. In my case, the credit for my work was given to my team mate. The work was so good that it could promote a guy. Also, I was given bad rating previous year without appropriate reasoning and was asked to leave once the project was over so that my work could be attributed to the other guy and manager could promote him. The manager had an incentive in promoting him as he had hired. Also, there was no public tracking of tasks. Although tools were available, my team wasn't using them. Timelines used to be there only for two people in my team which includes me. Other two people used to work in a relaxed manner without any timelines. Whenever they could finish their task was fine. This is probably the worst possible work culture on earth.

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