Amazon reviews

Working at AWS in their "Support" department was a real let down for me. I went from owning projects and creating new systems to answering phone calls and chats explaining to moronic customers that they are wrong, how to fix it and then wait for them to fix it while having a read-only view into their environment. My job could be done just as easily without a real computer, I only need some device to stream details out of our many databases. Indentured servitude. Seriously, soon as you join Amazon you're not allowed to leave for a year or you can owe them over $20,000 really quickly. Beware, only take this job if you want to answer chats and phone calls all day. For anyone who craves or needs hands on, this isn't for you. I'm leaving before I jump off the 27th floor of the building for having my soul sucked out of my chest, I'm eating the bill from Amazon and filing bankruptcy. Nothing else I can hope to do. My personal joy in life is worth more to me than the bragging rights of working at Amazon. Lunch and food on site is overpriced, management usually hides in their office cubes with no interaction and the emphasis on "numbers" is there even though they claim it's not.

I can't imagine having less work-life balance. We don't get sick days, so when you get sick you come in to work and give whatever you have to everyone else (and they return the favor, hooray!). They don't bother mentioning it in the offer, so it comes as a pretty big shock when you get sick - "Oh, by the way we're the only major company ever to not offer sick days." Of course you can take some of your very limited vacation days instead if you want (that is, if you even have any saved up). Another perk they don't tell you about: being on call. They don't have Ops teams here and barely have Customer Service, so as an SDE you get to play both. Getting paged at 3am for issues beyond your control is not a lot of fun, and neither is responding to customer issues all day with "this behavior is expected". And I hear if you're in Seattle, it's even worse (as in, even less work-life balance). God help our Seattle brethren.