Amazon reviews

The Culture - Working in sales at AWS is a nightmare. I'm shocked by how normalized the toxicity is here. People crying at their desks and working 60 hour workweeks out of pure fear of not "raising the bar". No one is ever recognized for their work unless they shamelessly self promote themselves. Leadership - Front line sales managers at AWS are notoriously bad. These are typically newly promoted, former individual contributors who have ZERO leadership skills whatsoever. They almost universally have very low EQ, are extremely Type A, chronically micromanage, and very rarely agree to promote anyone on their team. Pay - Pay is very low compared to competitors. Hiring process - I was misled by recruiters during the interview process. I was told that my desired salary was "well within the range" for my job, but when I was sent my offer after interviewing, it was more than $100K short. Career development - Amazon has "levels". Most AWS territory sales reps are hired as an L5 or L6, but some are hired as L4. If you are hired as an L4, you will have no opportunities beyond your current job, you will earn upwards of $100K less than your peers who do the exact same work, and it will be almost impossible to get promoted.

* Software Development Managers are hit and miss. Only some people are truly great and iconic (I am lucky to work for one, but that's last 3 years out of 7). Amazon figured out how to hire engineers well, but they seem to not do such a good job with managers. They do get the training, so over time some get better. If they want to. * Despite the number of truly smart engineers and hackers in the best sense of the word, there are a lot of folks who got CS degree & basic experience but require oversight, mentoring and time to grow. This ratio is not favorable for more experienced SDE2/3 engineers (there are teams who are exceptions to this). * Business management is hit or miss. Predominantly male and bro (I am male too), often falling into alpha-male mode of decision making, occasionally attracting poor actors who throw an entire organization into a doomsday project for a couple of years, claim the delivery, get their bonus, and then move to, say, AWS with no consequences when the product quietly flops and dies 1-2 years later. Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea of "failing fast" and trying new things, but it pains me to see when potentially good ideas are implemented haphazardly, without proper UX upfront work, without talking to prospective end customers, using a ton of cowboy coders and poor design (both UX and technical). Sometimes Amazon gets so lucky that the customers like their product despite the poor initial quality, giving the company enough time to improve it. It shows from the customer perspective, Amazon seems to be perpetually in the niche of "this is not Apple, but convenient enough for me to use it until somebody else makes a better version of this product". * Software is pretty poor on the low level. There are a few brilliantly designed systems, but the rest is a mess of startup-like code, half of which is deprecated and is written to meet short term business goals. SOA architecture but interactions between services are not thought through. Not many engineers know the big picture from tech and business standpoint. There is a constant pressure on the business (which directly translates to engineers) to take shortcuts and ship fast, because everyone else does. To give credit to Amazon, they tend to go through multi-year phases of chaotic expanding and then cleaning up, but it comes at the cost of engineers surviving through supporting (oncall) the crappy systems and having no resources (or knowledge) to fix them after the business finally says "ok, now we are truly losing money and people on this, let's fix it up please?" I am oncall this week and I was up till 5AM fixing things on Saturday night, only to hit the wall when another system didn't do what I expected. Neither of 3 other people from other related systems and respective support teams which I contacted knew which action need to be taken and whose system should be responsible for fixing the issue. As I said, in my experience only few engineers have deep understanding of the systems they own. The rest are struggling with crappy code, poor/no documentation (Amazon SDE/SDMs are kind of perversely proud of not documenting things) and passing the buck until they hit the person who knows the answer expected from them. * Lots of internal software which is built poorly where an open-source system would be better. "Not invented here" syndrome. There is no excuse for that, because improving / scaling up the open-source systems would be less costly than building poor internal clones. And better for the rest of the world. Bottom line - if you come to work here, you need to have integrity as an SDE or SDM. You need to be a self-starter and probably a bit workaholic. You need to be opinionated and confident enough to voice concerns and propose ideas, but also a good listener and open to ideas of others. You need to own your projects and be willing to drive them, be the squeaky wheel and demand that things are done in a long-term sustainable way. If you get a good and supportive manager, and smart business people, you will make things better. If you are an experienced engineer and plan on only following what you are told to do by your boss, please go somewhere else. If you are a beginner SDE - you will learn, but be prepared to take ownership for advancing your career, putting extra time outside of work to learn new things and not rely on your manager for it (because chances are, your manager won't do it very well). Be prepared to understand the agreements you sign, especially the part which says that Amazon can claim anything you code, design or ideate, even outside of workplace.