Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

3.6

58% would recommend to a friend

(954 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

19% approve of CEO

53% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer II employees have rated Amazon with 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 954 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer II professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer II professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

954 reviews
2.0
Aug 8, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You'll be working with systems that function on a scale that very, very few other companies have to worry about. Every year, they have to push the envelope to survive the Christmas season without melting down. It's something that you don't get elsewhere.

Cons

On call and operation load is a significant part of the job, but not a significant part of the job description. There is little effort to retain or reward employees. Employees are given responsibility over projects, but not the authority to make changes. It's a very top down company, and sadly, there are often cases where a project is redesigned at the last minute because middle management didn't get sign off from senior management, or senior management was flakey. There's no institutional memory, because of the high turnover. This means that people are reinventing the wheel a lot, often in parallel.

4.0
Jul 20, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon is a very innovative company with never a dull moment at work. Management greatly encourages new ideas/technology, given that you can get some free time off your operational load (see below). The company has some of the smartest people around and provides awesome learning and career growth opportunities. If you ever wonder what does it take to keep a large scale distributed system working where the customer never even realizes the machinery behind amazon.com, you need to come work at Amazon. Great place to work at, learn some new stuff and have fun while doing it. Amazon totally rocks!

Cons

Operational load messes up your regular development work. Be prepared to live with chaos.

4.0
Jul 8, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Fast paced dynamic environment. Smart co-workers. Strong sense of ownership in the decentralized model lends itself to designing and writing better software. Flexibility to explore alternate career paths.

Cons

- Benefits are poor. The 401k match is just 2%. Medical and dental plans are pretty ordinary. - Pager duty. Getting paged 40 times a week can be annoying. - Work/Life balance. I find myself working long hours more often than not.

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