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      Amazon

      Engaged Employer

      Amazon Software Engineer (Software Developer II) reviews

      3.4

      63% would recommend to a friend

      (339 total reviews)
      avatar

      Andrew Jassy

      20% approve of CEO

      59% positive business outlook

      Ratings by demographic groups

      Software Engineer (Software Developer II) employees have rated Amazon with 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 339 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Engineer (Software Developer II) professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Engineer (Software Developer II) professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

      Reviews by job title

      339 reviews
      2.0
      Jul 22, 2012

      Tough environment, shark eats shark

      Software engineer ii
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Smart people, some challenging computer science problems on _some_ teams. Growing stock

      Cons

      Unimpressive pay, heavy oncall/pager duty, unfair compensation structure, _NO_ perks compared to competitors. ZERO work life balance

      3.0
      Jul 7, 2012

      Growing pains of a company becoming huge.

      Software engineer ii
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Good comradely among the engineers. Very customer focused. You can pretty much kill any bad idea with "customers will hate it" argument. Agile program management means you'll keep up with what your team members are doing on a daily basis. Nearly everything is client/service architecture. Which if your team does it well, allows your to do whatever is best for your solution to your problem area without having huge migration issues with your clients. Generally managers are too busy to have those useless weekly meetings. (If you have daily ones why have a regular weekly one? You can always schedule a topic meeting to go over design issues etc.) Good and getting better support for bicycling to work. (bike cages, showers, lockers, and towels) Discount on buying stuff on their website.

      Cons

      On call. Nearly every engineering team has an on call rotation, so count the number of members and divide the number of days in a year by that number and that's the number of days you'll be on "house arrest" Because a page must be answered within 20 minutes any time day or night when you are on call. There seem to be more frameworks than teams. Everyone wants one and they tend to get imposed on your project in order to interface to some other needed service. Then the company drops support for it and you'll have to migrate your service. Difficult to do volunteer coding, ie help with your favorite freeware system, as you need approval from legal. It's not impossible but it's not straightforward either. Annual reviews tend to emphasis the negative vs the positive, that is you have peer feedback but your manager can pick and choose among the comments to either promote you or squash you. Very little opportunity to complain about it via HR.

      4.0
      May 24, 2012

      Life At Amazon

      Software engineer ii
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      lots of challenging problems and deals with lots of data

      Cons

      sometimes work-life balance is a mess

      Viewing 328 - 330 of 339 Reviews
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      Glassdoor has 251,068 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.