Amazon reviews

Each team is different, but I've heard everything you'll read in my review from every WDE I've spoken to at Amazon. The WDE position is a catch-all position for the lack of OE and process at Amazon and all the extra work and tedium that comes with it. You're expected to do SDE work, but you're also the goto "web technologies stack" developer, which means anything that someone else doesn't do is your job; and other people don't do a lot. The pay is not reflective of the struggle. 30-40% Dev time. Including architecture and planning. You are a secretary first, then admin, project manager, forecasting analyst, and finally a Dev. Their tooling sucks, really bad, and the teams that own said tooling are just as inefficient as everyone else, so everyone ends up in a whirlwind of inefficiency. As a web development engineer, you're expected to do much more project management work than SDE's, and almost as much development, but you get paid and respected significantly less. Product managers will attack you with feature requests daily, and you will usually be expected to finish those along with a multitude of other tasks; and the tooling and infrastructure cannot support such rapid feature development so you will get bugs and be stuck in a whirlwind of you and your teams edge-cases that cannot be tested for outside of prod When you do get a chance to do actual development: Days are either spent fighting the tooling(or lack thereof), or working on ugly code bases caused by unrealistic timelines for multiple ongoing projects with little care for your workload or lack of support structure. A population of new and inexperienced devs unfamiliar with technical debt and coding best practices is easily noticeable by looking at most packages' codebases. You will probably be lied to when you interview; I was. In the last year I have only written a few lines of JS, CSS, and HTML. This was not communicated appropriately in my interviews. Stock options are given out at a 5% after 1 year, 15% more after two years, then 20% every 6 months scale. This means that even though I was lied to in my interview and am mostly unhappy with my job, I had to stick it out for at least a few years for it to be worth it.

Any bad rumor that you have heard about abusive workplace, no work life balance, zero perks is ABSOLUTELY correct. If you have not read the New York times article please READ it now before joining amazon. You'll thank me later. If have any other offer or prospective offer, reject Amazon's offer. You'll thank me later even if the other job pays much less. There's no work life balance at amazon whatsoever. You will be FORCED to work after hours and over many weekends. You'll have to sacrifice your family and your social life. Of course, there's no explicit request for this but mangers implicitly whipping their yearly review process along with their unrealistic deadlines will leave you no other choice. Most of the mangers are not engineers and usually have business and project management background and have little to no interest or in depth understanding of software development process. They ONLY care about how they look in front of the higher ranking mangers and how large their annual bonuses are. If something goes wrong it's your fault as an engineer but if everything goes well your managers will pat themselves on the back and you won't hear a simple sincere "thank you". As for perks, No free food. No free snack. no free parking. no hotel discounts. No any kinds of discounts. You have to even pay for Amazon prime membership. literally zero perks. It's extremely cheap company with little respect or care for employees. The only thing you get for free is office coffee and that's the end of it. Be very cautious as recruiters and current employees can be deceitful. They are thought to reply with memorized " talking points" to attract potential candidates and to twist the facts. All in all, I regret pouring my life and energy into Amazon and highly discourage you from making that same mistake.