Amazon reviews

Huge letdown, overly and overtly political, toxic management, lack of loyalty from Amazon for its employees, concerns of employees are minimized and not addressed leaving negativity to fester, management has unrealistic expectations for sales goals without providing tools, asks sales people to hit a tough quota AND do a lot of side work and projects on top, management is disjointed, huge delusional egos at play, lack of follow through from management, management actually picks on employees, HR is a joke... could go on.

Amazon doesn't really give a feeling of warm fuzzy caring for its developers. Makes sense, since the profit margin is pretty low and we have to make it up in volume, but the lack of perks and decent developer hardware makes us feel kind of unloved at times ("frugality" is even one of our core leadership principles). I try to think of it as making us morally superior to companies that splurge on pampering the developers, but I do get jealous on occasion. Also, depending on the team... there can be a lot of obnoxious interference from business managers, randomization, and terrible codebases (we're moving away from Perl as the main language for website templating, but it's not happening nearly fast enough.) And sometimes teams are just meatgrinders - Amazon has a hard time hiring enough to keep up with project growth, much less to keep up with maintenance and OE. I'm also not a huge fan of future-vesting stocks in the place of actual money for bonuses/part of salary.