Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,603 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

50% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Amazon has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 209,603 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amazon employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

210K reviews
4.0
Nov 20, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Highly analytical culture with decisions driven by data. - Culture is not very political. Delivering results is noticed and rewarded. - Roles tend to be broad in scope with a lot of ownership. - Decisions are generally made quickly.

Cons

- Don't expect many pats on the back. Amazon has a highly critical culture where you leave almost every meeting feeling like you could have / should have done better. You will be perpetually pushed to move smarter and faster and dive deeper. You will rarely meet the exceedingly high bar that is set... and if, somehow, you do hit it they will immediately move the bar and tell you to keep trying harder.

1.0
Jan 22, 2013

Boring

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good pay, talented & fun coworkers, flexible hours, work from home, wide selection of food trucks at lunch time

Cons

This was a developer position, and I barely got the opportunity to program, and when I did it was mind numbingly trivial. I worked in Retail Systems, and they are mostly bogged down in trouble tickets and constant feature requests from the business side, leaving little time to actually develop software. Furthermore, the paranoia about losing money leads to aversion toward software change, which means the code-base is a monstrous pile of incremental changes accumulated over the years. Almost no documentation, and I frequently would hear sentiments that documentation or comments would be a hindrance-- since that would mean having to maintain the documentation or comments in parallel with the code (this might have just been a cultural aspect of my team). There seems to be a revolving door for young developers, as well as people jumping around from team to team, so teams' know-how deteriorates to the point where there are large portions of code that no one is familiar with. And yet, you have to support that code when you are on-call. If you aren't familiar with on-call, it means getting paged at any time of day when there are problems with the software. You might be thrown into a scenario where you are responsible for Amazon ordering being down, and the problem lies in your team's software, but you aren't familiar with that part of the code. You will probably just have to relay this to your team members-- which is fine-- but needless to say it is stressful. I was promised to eventually get the chance to do some real software development, but perhaps not for a year or more. If you are in it for the long haul, maybe it could be okay. I didn't care about the money, and it didn't make it worth letting my career stagnate for 2-3 years waiting until I was senior enough to do maybe have the chance to do some real work.

1.0
Aug 3, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pretty decent salary Nice location Looks good on resume Get to work with some really smart people (doesn't mean they can manage well though) Depending on the category, the product samples can be quite nice

Cons

1) The expected work hours are insane and I'm not just talking about the 'holiday push'. I actually worked 70+ hrs for 6 months straight and that still wasn't enough really. Most of the categories are severely understaffed. The strategy seems to offer slightly higher than average salaries but require staff to do the work of two people! 2) Management is worthless. While I can say that most managers I met were incredibly bright people, I can say that almost all of them have ZERO people management skills. 3) MBA recruiting process is a joke. They had the gall to completely change the program AFTER everyone had accepted offers. 4) Benefits are horrible compared to competition.

Viewing 289 - 291 of 209,603 Reviews

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